The    Natural    Style    in 

LANDSCAPE 
GARDENING 


FRANK  A.  WAUGH 


BOSTON:    RICHARD   G.  BADGER 

TORONTO:  THE  COPP  CLARK  co.,  LIMITED 


73948 


COPTBIGHT,  1917.  BT  RlCHARD  G.  BADGEH 

All  Rights  Reserved 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 
The  Gorham  Press,  Boston,  U.  S.  A. 


SB 

18. 

NU'3-5 


TO 

GEORGE  A.  PARKER 

LOVEB     OF     THE     LANDSCAPE 

AND 
LOVEB    OF    MANKIND 


CONTENTS 


VX^  PAGE 

b,  WHAT  Is  MEANT 11 

THE  NATIVE  LANDSCAPE .'25 

FORM  AND  SPIRIT 43 

THE  LANDSCAPE  MOTIVE 64 

PRINCIPLES  OF  STRUCTURAL  COMPOSITION  ....  74 

^  THE  ART  OF  GROUPING 92 

FEATURES  AND  FURNISHINGS 120 

'0\^  THE  OPEN  FIELD 140 

INDEX 149 


no 


k 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

Mountain  Scenery — Blackmore  Lake,  Montana  .     Frontispiece 

FACING  PAGE 

Explorations    Inland 18 

The  Meadow  Brook 18 

Sunlight  in  the  Birches 22 

Pipes  o'  Pan 22 

In  the  Rocky  Mountains 30 

A  National  Forest  Landscape,  Arizona       ....  30 

Pulling  Over  the  Rapids 38 

Informal  Composition,  Grounds  of  the  Massachusetts 

Agricultural  College 38 

In  the  Berkshire  Hills 46 

Early   Springtime 60 

As  Viewed  from  the  Bridge 60 

On  Mount  Toby,  Massachusetts 70 

Naturalistic  Composition,  Grounds  of  the  Massachusetts 

Agricultural  College 70 

New  England  Country  Road 78 

"Going  Fishing."    The  Country  Road 78 

Naturalistic  Composition,  Back  Yard  Garden  ...  86 

A  Natural  Grouping  of  Trees 96 

Row  of  Trees  Along  the  Pasture  Fence      .       .       .       .100 

Old  Apple  Orchard 100 

Walk  Along  Rock  Creek,  Washington,  D.  C.             .       .106 
Chestnut  Trunks.    An  Effective  Grouping  ....  106 
Hillside  Garden.     Grounds  of  the  Massachusetts  Agri- 
cultural College 116 


List  of  Illustrations 


FACING  PAGB 

A  Garden  Campfire.    The  Author's  Garden  .       ,       .       .130 

Mountain  Trail 130 

Where  Woods  and  Meadow  Meet  ....  142 


THE  NATURAL  STYLE  IN 
LANDSCAPE  GARDENING 


THE  NATURAL  STYLE  IN  LAND- 
SCAPE GARDENING 

WHAT  IS  MEANT 

ALL  the  older  men  and  women  now  living 
whose  recollections  of  garden  matters  run 
back,  say  into  the  seventies,  will  remember 
the  violent  controversy  then  raging  between  the 
advocates  of  the  formal  garden  on  the  one  side 
and  of  the  natural  style  on  the  other.  Those  were 
days  of  violent  partizanship  in  all  matters.  In  poli- 
tics and  religion  people  were  habitually  intolerant. 
In  certain  families  it  was  held  that  to  vote  the  demo- 
cratic ticket  was  prima  facie  evidence  of  murder, 
arson,  and  embezzlement  of  funds.  In  other  circles 
it  was  fully  agreed  that  unless  one  were  immersed 
into  a  particular  church  he  would  surely  land  in 
the  eternal  fires.  Amongst  people  trained  in  this 
temper  the  ardent  disagreements  over  garden  style 
were  perfectly  natural  and  necessary. 


11 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

And,  we  ought  to  add,  altogether  bad.  Though 
some  theorists  may  argue  that  the  modern  man's 
lack  of  strong  convictions  is  a  weakness,  it  is  per- 
fectly plain  that  the  growth  of  tolerance,  the  broad- 
ening of  view,  the  greater  catholicity  of  taste  in  all 
matters,  mark  a  very  genuine  advance.  It  is  a 
great  and  genuine  gain  for  the  spirit  of  humanity. 

This  change,  which  has  marked  all  realms  of 
thought,  has  been  as  effective  in  the  field  of  land- 
scape gardening  as  anywhere  else.  To  those  of  us 
who  remember  it,  it  has  been  equally  agreeable. 

We  may  fairly  claim  to  have  achieved  a  full 
freedom  in  these  matters.  Every  well-trained 
landscape  architect  in  America  designs  freely  in 
either  the  formal  or  the  natural  style,  frequently 
using  both  styles  in  different  parts  of  the  same 
project.  The  ill-natured  polemics  of  the  seven- 
ties have  disappeared  altogether  from  the  garden 
literature  of  the  present  day. 

This  change  has  been  wholly  for  good.  I  rejoice 
in  every  thought  of  it ;  and  as  I  take  up  now  a  dis- 
cussion of  the  natural  style,  my  unwavering  alle- 
giance to  the  modern  Catholicism  must  be  most  em- 


12 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

phatically  declared.  Thus  when  I  find  it  necessary 
to  praise  the  natural  style,  to  allege  some  neglect 
of  it,  and  to  make  some  comparisons  in  its  favor, 
these  statements  must  not  be  taken  to  reflect  ad- 
versely on  any  other  style  nor  to  indicate  a  partizan 
opinion. 

To  trace  fully  the  development  of  the  idea  of 
a  natural  style,  in  gardening  would  be  exceedingly 
interesting,  but  it  would  require  a  great  deal  of 
time  and  space.  Fortunately  a  complete  histori- 
cal review  is  not  necessary  to  our  present  purposes. 
It  is  essential  to  observe,  however,  that  the  natural 
style  has  meant  very  diff erent  things  at  different 
times.  Nearly  every  reformer  has  advertised  his 
own  work  as  more  natural  than  his  predecessors, 
or  as  a  "return  to  nature."  The  garden  of  Eden 
is  described  as  designed  in  the  natural  style. 

Batty  Langley  was  one  of  the  most  interesting 
of  these  reformers,  and  it  is  worth  while  now  to  note 
what  was  his  idea  of  the  natural  style.  The  plate 
used  as  an  end  paper  in  this  volume,  from  his  book, 
will  show  pretty  clearly  what  he  had  in  mind 
when  he  announced  his  "New  Principles  of  Gar- 
is 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

dening:  Or,  The  Laying  out  and  Planting  Par- 
terres, Groves,  Wildernesses,  Labyrinths,  Ave- 
nues, Parks,  &c.,  after  a  more  Grand  and  Rural 
Manner,  than  has  been  done  before." 

Another  curious  episode  was  the  career  of  Laun- 
celot  Brown — "Old  Capability  Brown,"  as  his  jeal- 
ous critics  dubbed  him.  His  contribution  to  the 
natural  style  was  the  discovery  that  "Nature  ab- 
hors a  straight  line."  Therefore  away  with  straight 
lines.  With  a  strong  start  in  this  direction  it  is 
easy  to  conclude  that  the  further  we  get  away  from 
the  straight  line  the  nearer  we  get  to  Nature.  So 
Brown  made  walks  and  drives  and  artificial  water- 
courses so  crooked  that  they  lost  their  way.  It  was 
said  that  his  walks  tied  themselves  in  true  lovers' 
knots  and  that  his  made  rivers  often  doubled  and 
crossed  their  own  courses.  Brown  made  himself 
thoroughly  ridiculous,  but  he  illustrated  one  idea 
of  the  natural  style,  and  an  idea  which  has  more 
recently  and  in  a  milder  form  had  a  distinguished 
hearing  in  America. 

After  Brown  arose  a  small  group  of  doctrinaires 
who  theorized  that  the  only  way  to  make  a  truly 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

natural  composition  was  to  copy  it  in  detail  from 
nature.  The  neglected  moraine,  the  common  stone 
heap  and  the  untutored  wayside  copse  became  their 
patterns  to  be  slavishly  reproduced  in  their  "gar- 
dens." Because  broken,  dead  and  blasted  trees 
were  found  in  the  native  woods  these  enthusiasts 
transplanted  dead  trees  to  their  private  parks. 
These  extravagances,  however,  soon  followed  Laun- 
celot  Brown's  crooked  line  theory  into  the  limbo 
of  discarded  jokes. 

The  idea  of  making  literal  transcriptions  from 
Nature  has  had  a  much  greater  and  more  interest- 
ing development  elsewhere.  What  we  know  (and 
very  vaguely  understand)  as  the  Japanese  style 
of  landscape  gardening — a  style  which  it  appears 
originated  in  China — is  founded  precisely  on  this 
theory.  The  original  idea  was  to  copy  certain  clas- 
sic landscapes  or  landscape  arrangements;  and  as 
these  first  oriental  landscape  gardeners  were  priests, 
and  as  their  gardening  was  primarily  for  the  em- 
bellishment of  the  temple  grounds,  their  prime 
models  were  certain  sacred  landscapes,  made  sa- 
cred by  association  with  other  shrines. 


15 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

These  sacred  landscape  arrangements  were  then 
reproduced  in  other  localities,  but,  as  in  a  drawing, 
to  a  scale  considerably  smaller  than  the  originals.  It 
was  considered  obligatory  to  preserve  this  reduced 
scale  throughout  the  copy.  Thus  if  the  copy  was 
at  one-tenth  the  size  of  the  original,  each  hill  and 
each  tree  must  be  reduced  in  the  same  propor- 
tion. While  obviously  this  theory  has  not  been 
rigidly  adhered  to  in  all  examples  of  Japanese 
gardening,  it  has  been  carried  far  enough  to  make 
most  gardens  seem  very  curious  to  occidental  eyes. 
But  the  Japanese  gardener  sometimes  asserts  that 
his  is  the  only  natural  style,  and  from  his  point 
of  view  he  is  just  as  nearly  right  as  anybody  else. 

In  America  there  have  been  less  radical  but  very 
plain  differences  of  opinion  as  to  what  really  con- 
stitutes a  natural  style.  The  idea  which  has  had 
the  widest  vogue  has  certainly  been  the  native  flora 
cult.  A  very  respectable  number  of  very  respecta- 
ble gardening  persons  (with  perhaps  the  tender 
sex  predominating)  have  made  themselves  quite  de- 
lightful grounds  with  plants  selected  strictly  from 
the  local  flora.  Of  course  there  have  been  some 


16 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

differences.  One  gardener  would  accept  any  spe- 
cies native  to  America;  another  insists  on  plants 
from  his  own  state;  the  garden  maker  of  real  con- 
victions accepts  nothing  but  what  grows  naturally 
on  his  own  farm. 

My  friend  Dr.  Wilhelm  Miller  in  his  recent  cru- 
sade for  "the  Illinois  way"  represents  a  temperate 
recrudescence  of  this  native  plant  propaganda.  For 
it  is  a  part  of  "the  Illinois  way"  to  use  Illinois 
plants.  The  arguments  for  this  way  are  largely 
the  arguments  for  a  natural  style  of  gardening. 

Probably  the  majority  of  trained  landscape  ar- 
chitects when  designing  in  the  natural  style  employ 
a  good  many  non-indigenous  species.  Their  test 
is  simply  that  a  plant  shall  be  effectively  natural- 
ized. Their  compositions  are  pictorial — made  to 
appeal  to  the  eye  rather  than  to  a  botanical  edu- 
cation. If  a  plant  looks  perfectly  at  home  it  is  to 
all  reasonable  requirements  natural. 

This  seems  to  be  a  safe  middle-ground.  Cer- 
tainly he  would  be  a  hard  theorist  and  an  intoler- 
able puritan  who  would  exclude  the  common  lilac 
and  the  homely  apple  tree  from  his  grounds  simply 

17 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

because  they  are  not  native  to  America.  It  wouldn't 
be  good  democratic  Americanism,  either,  for  the 
great  bulk  of  our  citizens  are  derived  from  foreign 
stocks. 

The  anti-straight-line  theory  as  a  fundamental 
element  of  the  natural  style  seems  to  have  been  held 
by  Downing  and  by  Olmsted,  Senior.  It  has  been 
much  emphasized  by  some  of  their  followers;  but 
careful  designers  have  learned  that  simply  to  avoid 
straight  lines  and  radial  curves  gets  one  nowhere. 
It  certainly  does  not  lead  to  naturalness.  Indeed, 
it  seems  philosophically  impossible  to  found  any 
positive  or  constructive  method  on  any  purely 
negative  dictum. 

In  order  to  arrive  at  a  perfectly  clear  conception 
of  what  we  now  mean  when  we  talk  among  ourselves 
about  the  natural  style,  it  seems  best  to  consider 
more  carefully  what  is  meant  by  style  in  landscape 
gardening.  It  is  one  of  the  unfortunate  vagaries 
of  language  that  this  term  has  assumed  a  special 
meaning  in  landscape  gardening  distinctly  differ- 
ent from  what  it  carries  in  other  arts.  In  litera- 
ture, where  this  other  meaning  is  clearest,  style 


18 


1 '**>** 


THE    MEADOW    BROOK 

Photographs  by  the  Author 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

signifies  the  personal  peculiarities  of  the  author. 
Mr.  William  Dean  Howells  has  his  style  by  which 
his  work  can  be  recognized,  and  David  Grayson 
has  his. 

In  landscape  gardening,  on  the  other  hand,  styles 
are  national — perhaps,  more  strictly  speaking,  ra- 
cial. The  Japanese  style  embodies  the  garden  char- 
acteristics of  a  whole  race.  The  Italian  style  does 
the  same.  Every  style  which  ever  had  a  name  was 
called  by  the  name  of  the  race  or  nation  which  prac- 
ticed it;  and  one  of  the  questions  now  before  the 
house  is  whether  we  shall  ever  have  an  American 
style. 

We  may  therefore  define  style,  as  used  in  this 
particular  art,  as  being  the  expression  of  the  na- 
tional, racial  or  ethnic  quality  in  landscape  garden- 
ing. 

But  what  of  the  natural  and  the  formal  styles 
of  gardening?  They  do  not  bear  national  names, 
though  they  have  been  often  and  inaptly  called  the 
English  and  the  Italian  styles.  The  fact  is  that 
these  are  not  styles  at  all  in  any  strict  use  of  lan- 
guage, but  great  garden  forms.  The  formal  form 


19 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

may  be  closely  compared  to  poetry  and  the  infor- 
mal form  to  prose.  Each  is  a  structural  method  of 
composition — a  form.  Poetry  is  one  literary  form ; 
prose  is  another.  National  or  personal  styles  may 
be  expressed  through  either  of  these  forms. 

Up  to  this  point,  therefore,  and  subject  to  a  very 
important  addition  later  to  be  made,  we  may  say 
that  the  so-called  natural  style  is  really  a  funda- 
mental garden  form.  It  is  a  structural  form  char- 
acterized by  certain  resemblances  to  the  natural 
landscape.  These  points  of  resemblance  are  some- 
times quite  arbitrarily  chosen  by  the  garden  de- 
signer, and  sometimes  quite  artificially  developed; 
but  it  is  always  the  logical  aim  of  the  artist  to 
discover  and  to  follow  the  principles  of  composi- 
tion followed  by  nature. 

This  structural  form  is  distinguished  further,  in 
a  purely  negative  manner,  by  contrast  with  the 
formal  garden  form,  which  is  symmetrical,  bal- 
anced, enclosed  and  determinate,  whereas  the  in- 
formal form  is  unsymmetrical,  not  obviously  bal- 
anced, not  apparently  enclosed  and  not  marked  by 
visible  boundaries. 


20 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

(Our  terminology  here,  where  we  speak  of  the 
formal  form  and  the  informal  form,  is  execrable, 
but  it  is  unavoidable,  and  the  ideas  are  perfectly 
definite  and  logical.) 

Our  partial  definition  of  the  so-called  natural 
style  of  landscape  gardening  speaks  of  it  in  terms 
of  form.  But  any  vital  style  must  have  something 
more  than  form.  It  must  also  have  a  living,  breath- 
ing spirit.  Any  form  without  spirit  is  dead  and  fit 
only  for  the  crematory. 

What  then  is  the  informing  spirit  of  the  natural 
style?  Is  it  not  the  spirit  of  the  natural  landscape? 
We  speak  of  the  spirit  of  the  woods,  or  the  spirit 
of  the  mountains ;  and,  quite  as  precisely  as  common 
language  can  ever  convey  spiritual  ideas,  we  know 
what  we  mean.  We  do  actually  have  a  perfectly 
clear  idea  in  mind  when  we  speak  of  these  things. 

The  idea  is  not  only  clear,  but  valuable  in  the 
highest  degree.  Our  spiritual  ideas  are  always  more 
important  than  our  thoughts  about  materials;  and 
it  is  more  important  to  any  man — much  more  im- 
portant— to  know  the  spirit  of  the  woods  or  the 
spirit  of  the  plains  or  the  spirit  of  the  mountains, 


21 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

than  to  kno\?  the  properties  of  benzine  or  the  names 
of  golf  clubs  or  the  uses  of  gunpowder. 

It  is  not  difficult  to  see  that  this  spirit  of  the 
landscape  is  different  from  the  spirit  of  architec- 
ture. Thus  any  one  who  is  capable  of  a  spiritual 
conception  of  any  sort  can  readily  accept  the  prin- 
ciple that,  while  the  formal  garden  should  be  ani- 
mated by  the  architectural  spirit,  the  informal  gar- 
den should  live  by  the  spirit  of  the  landscape. 

We  are  all  so  much  unaccustomed  to  thinking  in 
spiritual  terms,  and  the  significance  of  this  idea  is 
so  essential,  that  it  will  be  well  to  spend  a  little 
more  time  upon  it.  For  purposes  of  illustration 
let  us  imagine  ourselves  sitting  on  the  pasture  fence 
in  the  friendly  sunshine  of  a  warm  June  afternoon. 
Before  us  there  spreads,  let  us  say,  the  rolling  green 
pasture  lands,  interspersed  with  scattered  oaks,  and 
in  the  midst  a  dimpling  deliberate  river.  In  the 
shade  of  the  trees  the  well-fed  cows  rest  and  rumi- 
nate. Over  all  stretches  the  quiet  blue  sky,  deep- 
ening to  a  purpling  haze  along  the  distant  horizon 
as  the  afternoon  wanes.  It  is  a  landscape  which 
appeals  to  every  physical  sense.  We  rejoice  to 


22 


SUXLIGHT    IX    THE    BIRCHES 


PIPES    O     PAN 

Photographs  by  the  Author 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

be  alive  in  it. 

But  does  it  not  appeal  to  other  than  our  physical 
senses?  Does  it  not  touch  some  spiritual  sense? 
As  we,  civilized  human  beings,  sit  there  amidst 
the  glory  of  that  June  landscape,  do  we  appre- 
hend nothing  but  the  physical  landscape?  What 
do  we  really  see?  Only  the  trees  and  the  grass 
and  the  river?  Only  these?  If  that  is  really  all 
we  see  then  the  good  Jersey  cow  ruminating  under 
the  tree  has  a  very  substantial  advantage  over  us. 
She  sees  the  tree  and  the  grass  and  the  river;  and 
besides  that  she  sees  a  square  meal.  She  crops  the 
grass,  drinks  the  water,  retires  to  the  shade  of 
the  tree  and  ruminates. 

Do  we  bring  back  from  that  fair  landscape  any- 
thing which  we  may  ruminate?  If  we  really  do  suc- 
ceed in  capturing  something  more  than  what  the 
cow  gets,  that  harvest  must  be  a  spiritual  product. 
It  is  the  spirit  of  the  landscape. 

There  may  be  men  and  women  who  get  less  from 
the  landscape  than  the  cow  does.  If  there  are,  I 
am  sure  they  will  not  admit  it.  So  perhaps  we 
may  let  the  case  rest  there  for  the  present.  In  a 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

subsequent  chapter  we  shall  give  more  extended 
discussion  to  the  meaning  of  the  native  landscape. 
This  is  in  reality  an  endeavor  to  understand  the 
landscape  in  spiritual  terms,  and  thus  to  make  more 
clear  our  full  definition  which  is  that  the  natural 
style  of  landscape  gardening  endeavors  to  present 
its  pictures  in  forms  typical  of  the  natural  land- 
scape and  made  vital  by  the  landscape  spirit. 

In  this  connection  it  is  essential  to  remember  that 
a  good  deal  of  landscape  art,  and  especially  that 
which  adopts  the  natural  style,  is  not  required  to 
make  every  picture  out  of  whole  cloth.  It  might 
be  more  accurately  described  as  intelligently  let- 
ting alone  a  natural  landscape.  What  does  the  wise 
landscape  gardener  do  when  called  upon  to  treat  a 
stretch  of  attractive  natural  scenery?  He  must, 
first  and  foremost,  endeavor  to  understand  the 
spirit  of  his  landscapes.  Then  his  work  will  be  to 
simplify  and  accentuate  the  characteristic  natural 
forms  (chiefly  topography  and  flora),  and  to  clar- 
ify and  interpret  the  spirit  of  the  place.  This  clari- 
fication and  interpretation  of  spiritual  values  is 
the  real  work  of  the  real  artist. 


THE  NATIVE   LANDSCAPE 

WHETHER  our  foregoing  definition  of 
the  natural  style  is  adequate  or  defec- 
tive, it  must  be  plain  that  any  natural- 
istic style  of  landscape  gardening  is  largely  de- 
pendent on  the  native  landscape.  The  ideas,  mo- 
tives, and  methods  must  come  mainly  from  nature. 
Indeed,  it  would  seem  certain  that  any  landscape 
architect  of  any  school  must  know  and  love  the 
landscape.  Such  knowledge  and  such  sympathy 
would  be  fundamentally  and  absolutely  necessary. 
Whenever  the  designer  professes,  however,  to  do 
his  landscape  gardening  in  the  natural  style,  it 
would  seem  doubly  incumbent  on  him  to  bring  to 
his  work  a  critical  understanding  of  nature's  land- 
scape and  a  love  of  the  native  landscape  at  once 
ardent,  sane,  discriminating  and  balanced.  A  mere 
boyish  enthusiasm  will  not  answer.  It  must  be  the 
true,  tried  and  fixed  love  of  maturity. 

Thus  it  becomes  the  first  and  perhaps  the  most 


£5 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

important  step  in  landscape  gardening,  especially 
naturalistic  landscape  gardening,  to  know  and  to 
love  the  native  landscape.  Both  knowledge  and 
love  are  required.  Can  we,  now,  point  out  any 
practical  approach  to  the  landscape?  any  way  of 
understanding  it  better?  especially  any  means  of 
loving  it  more?  Assuredly  we  can. 

At  the  outset  we  may  gain  some  respect  for  the 
landscape  by  observing  its  power.  It  does  exert  a 
truly  marvelous  power  upon  the  intelligence  of 
men;  and  their  feelings,  which  lie  deeper,  are  even 
more  profoundly  affected.  Common  men  love  the 
landscape  passionately.  The  attachment  to  home 
is  largely  the  love  of  landscape.  When  the  army 
of  Cyrus,  defeated  and  disheartened,  came  back 
from  their  long  campaign  in  Persia,  they  fell  down 
and  wept  when,  from  the  top  of  a  hill,  they  caught 
the  first  view  of  the  sea.  It  was  to  them  the  land- 
scape of  home.  They  were  not  especially  suscepti- 
ble or  responsive  men — certainly  not  artists  trained 
to  the  love  of  beauty.  Human  nature  is  still  the 
same.  Any  man,  no  matter  how  dull,  who  has 
grown  up  amongst  the  hills  of  Vermont  has,  neces- 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

sarily  and  positively,  a  deep  love  of  that  particular 
landscape  in  his  heart.  Let  him  be  exiled  for  a 
few  years  in  Texas  or  France  or  Chicago  and 
then  let  him  revisit  the  Green  Mountains.  His 
heart  will  leap  up  like  a  mother  to  her  child.  His 
emotions  will  be  stirred  to  their  profoundest  depths. 
There  is  hardly  a  human  experience  anywhere  of 
greater  reach  or  power. 

This  particular  experience,  while  universal  and 
known  of  all  men,  is  somewhat  provincial.  Culti- 
vated men  learn  to  love  other  landscapes  than  those 
to  which  they  were  born.  A  part  of  the  value  of 
landscape  lies  in  its  universality.  The  landscape  is 
everywhere.  The  lover  of  books  cannot  always 
live  in  a  library;  the  lover  of  music  cannot  find 
anywhere  a  perpetual  concert;  the  lover  of  paint- 
ing cannot  shut  himself  up  in  an  art  gallery;  but 
the  lover  of  the  landscape  has  his  joy  always  with 
him.  Even  the  hater  of  the  landscape,  if  there 
could  be  such  a  man,  could  not  escape  from  it. 

Now  since  art  is  after  all  primarily  the  love 
and  enjoyment  of  the  beautiful,  and  since  the  land- 
scape is  physically  present  to  all  people,  and  since 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

it  appeals  powerfully  to  practically  all  people,  we 
must  regard  it  as  the  principal  source  in  the  world 
of  esthetic  joy.  It  is  the  world's  principal  reser- 
voir of  beauty.  It  does  more  for  the  esthetic  life 
of  mankind  than  all  the  painting,  sculpture,  po- 
etry and  architecture  in  all  the  world  taken  to- 
gether. This  is  a  large  claim,  but  it  is  a  simple 
and  obvious  truth. 

For  this  reason  we  should  all  greatly  reverence 
the  native  landscape,  should  seek  to  conserve  it 
for  human  use  and  enjoyment,  should  endeavor  to 
make  it  physically  accessible  to  all,  should  try  to 
make  it  intelligible  to  all,  should  work  to  open  up 
for  it  the  way  to  men's  hearts. 

Let  us  take  the  case  of  the  young  man  who  pro- 
poses to  become  a  landscape  architect  and  who 
hopes  to  do  some  of  his  work  in  the  natural  style 
— or  the  informal  form,  if  we  prefer  an  exacter 
nomenclature.  In  his  earnest  desire  to  know  and 
love  the  native  landscape  his  first  plain  step  will 
be  to  associate  with  it.  He  will  go  out  with  the 
landscape.  He  will  spend  hours,  days  and  weeks 
with  it.  Instead  of  going  to  the  bowling  alleys, 


28 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

the  billiard  rooms,  the  dances  and  the  movies,  he 
will  go  to  the  hills,  he  will  visit  the  lakes,  he  will 
follow  the  brooks,  he  will  camp  on  the  plains.  All 
this  is  so  simple,  so  obvious,  so  easy,  that  it  needs 
only  to  be  mentioned  to  be  established  as  a  fruitful 
means  of  landscape  study. 

Of  course  the  student  will  visit  the  landscape- 
no,  he  will  live  with  it — with  an  open  mind  and 
heart.  He  will  be  trying  to  see  what  the  landscape 
has  to  offer,  trying  to  hear  what  it  has  to  tell.  He 
will  look  long,  quietly,  silently,  intently  at  the  hori- 
zon, or  at  the  distant  valley,  or  at  the  mountains. 
And  most  of  all  he  will  consciously  seek  their  spirit- 
ual message.  He  will  know  that  as  a  man  it  is  ab- 
solutely obligatory  upon  him  to  see  something  in 
that  landscape  more  than  the  cow  sees.  Whatever 
he  gets  beyond  what  the  cow  gets  is  the  spiritual 
harvest  of  the  landscape.  It  is  the  only  part  which 
is  of  any  human  use. 

In  another  place  I  have  tried  to  extend  the  defi- 
nition of  the  landscape  to  include  such  items  as  the 
sky,  and  the  weather.  The  man  who  is  thus  con- 
scientiously seeking  the  spiritual  message  of  the 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

landscape  will  look  long  and  often  at  the  sky.  My 
own  students  are  directed  to  spend  frequent  hours 
of  solitude  lying  on  their  backs  looking  up  into  the 
depths  of  the  heavens. 

This  exercise  should  be  practiced  nights  as  well  as 
days.  The  deep  infinities  of  the  sky  are  more  visible 
when  pricked  out  by  the  twinkling  stars  than  when 
illuminated  by  the  sun.  The  exercise  should  be 
used  also  in  all  weathers — when  the  sky  is  full  of 
fresh  falling  snow  or  of  pearly  raindrops.  For 
the  landscape  lover  must  love  all  aspects  of  the 
sky  and  all  moods  of  the  weather. 

While  the  fundamental  psychological  appeal  of 
the  landscape  is  universal,  reaching  to  all  men's 
hearts,  there  are  differences  in  minor  manifesta- 
tions. The  landscape  does  not  mean  the  same  to 
everybody.  The  landscape,  like  religion  or  any 
other  great  experience,  is  "all  things  to  all  men." 

To  the  farmer  the  landscape  is  a  part  of  the 
day's  work.  He  plows  and  sows  and  harvests  the 
landscape.  If  he  is  a  true  farmer  his  fields  become 
inestimably  dear  to  him.  The  sun,  the  wind,  and 
the  rain  are  his  friends.  He  knows  and  loves  them. 


so 


IX    THE    ROCKY    MOUNTAINS 


A    NATIONAL    FOBEST    LANDSCAPE ARIZONA 

Photographs  by  the  United  States  Forest  Service 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

The  forester  lives  in  the  woods.  To  him  the 
landscape  is  full  of  trees.  These  are  spread  over 
rocky  mountain  sides  and  interspersed  with  friendly 
brooks.  So  the  landscape  takes  on  for  the  forester 
a  very  special  color  and  character. 

In  America  the  pioneer  has  played  a  deeply  sig- 
nificant role.  There  have  been  generations  of  pion- 
eers, from  those  who  landed  at  Plymouth  and 
Jamestown  to  those  who  settled  the  plains  and 
captured  the  Oregon.  This  body  of  pioneers  has 
moved  forward  across  the  continent  from  one  ocean 
to  the  other  with  a  slow,  steady,  indefeasible  march. 
For  more  than  200  years  their  campfires  lighted  the 
way.  Generation  after  generation  of  hardy  men 
and  women  lived  roughly  in  the  open  or  sheltered 
by  log  huts  or  sod  shanties.  They  lived  very  near 
to  the  landscape.  They  loved  it  profoundly.  Many 
of  them  loved  it  so  deeply  that  they  could  not  bear 
to  share  it  with  neighbors.  As  soon  as  the  settle- 
ments arrived  and  the  landscape  was  invaded  and 
despoiled,  the  pioneers  moved  on. 

To  understand  anything  of  American  history  it 
is  necessary  to  understand  these  pioneers,  and  to  un- 


31 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

derstand  them  at  all  we  must  understand  their  love 
of  the  landscape.  This  element  has  had  a  wide- 
reaching  influence  in  American  life. 

This  feeling,  perhaps  in  a  form  of  genuine  hered- 
ity, shows  itself  frequently  in  the  best  established 
citizens  in  the  midst  of  our  most  complicated  mod- 
ern civilization.  Men  break  away  from  big  cities 
year  by  year  and  seek  the  wilderness.  They  go  to 
the  farthest  solitudes.  They  spend  the  longest  va- 
cations they  can  capture  in  hunting,  fishing,  tramp- 
ing. They  find  a  fierce  joy  in  the  wilderness.  The 
landscape  to  them  means  freedom.  It  means  re- 
lease from  a  strenuous  civilization  which  at  best 
they  find  only  partly  good. 

All  outdoor  sports  constitute  more  or  less  tem- 
porary release  from  civilization  and  a  return  to  the 
landscape.  Fox  chasing,  automobiling,  fly  fishing, 
and  the  entire  list  of  outdoor  recreations  belong  in 
this  category.  They  are  merely  so  many  different 
ways  of  reaching  the  landscape. 

Even  the  more  socialized  competitive  outdoor 
sports,  such  as  baseball  and  football,  are  still  out- 
door sports.  The  baseball  game  would  be  worth- 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

less  if  it  were  not  played  under  the  open  sky.  The 
spectators  on  the  bleachers  must  still  look  up  and 
see  the  blue  heavens  even  if  the  horizon  is  damned 
with  a  circle  of  painted  signs  advertising  the  worst 
brands  of  beer  and  tobacco. 

A  more  refined  and  lady-like  approach  to  the 
landscape  is  found  in  gardening.  Gardening  as 
a  polite  domestic  art  is  perhaps  the  most  com- 
plete combination  of  civilization  and  the  landscape 
which  has  yet  been  devised.  If  we  press  this  on  to 
the  point  where  it  becomes  really  landscape  garden- 
ing it  would  surely  deserve  this  description,  for 
what  could  landscape  gardening  be  except  such  a 
full  and  final  fusion  of  the  landscape  with  the  social 
human  artificial  domestic  garden? 

One  who  undertakes  to  study  the  native  land- 
scape with  any  thoroughness  should  properly  ap- 
proach the  subject  by  studying  the  principal  types 
of  native  landscape.  It  will  not  do  simply  to  study 
the  landscape  in  general.  One  must  be  more  ana- 
lytic and  specific. 

As  a  matter  of  fact  most  persons  in  their  primary 
love  of  home  found  their  love  of  landscape  upon 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

acquaintance  with  a  particular  type.  The  citizen 
of  Cape  Cod  loves  the  sea  and  the  dunes.  The 
native  of  Nebraska  loves  the  plains.  The  habitant 
of  Quebec  loves  the  woods,  and  the  men  bred 
amongst  the  mountains  of  Colorado  must  love  the 
white-peaked  Rockies. 

The  man  who  really  sets  out  to  know  and  love 
the  landscape,  however,  whether  he  be  a  student 
of  landscape  architecture  or  a  mere  citizen  of  the 
universe,  will  try  to  know  different  types  of  land- 
scape. He  will  seek  to  make  the  acquaintance  of 
as  many  distinct  types  as  possible.  For  this  rea- 
son it  is  desirable  to  consider  what  are  the  princi- 
pal landscape  types. 

It  is  reasonably  accurate  to  say,  though  there  is 
nothing  scientific  in  the  classification,  that  the  four 
great  types  of  landscape  are  the  sea,  the  mountains, 
the  plains,  and  the  forests.  These  great  types 
every  one  should  know.  Certainly  every  man  who 
professes  to  be  a  landscape  architect  should  assimi- 
late into  his  own  life  these  fundamental  landscape 
forms. 

The  sea  has  always  been  a  power  in  human 


3-1 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

thought.  Its  wide  and  infinite  reaches,  its  constant 
motion,  its  vivid  expression  of  power,  its  versatile 
changes,  its  human  and  super-human  moods,  its 
delicate  colorings,  even  its  salty  smell,  make  it  so 
vivid  that  no  human  consciousness  could  possibly 
escape  it.  A  mere  glimpse  of  the  sea  must  pro- 
foundly impress  the  most  unsympathetic  stranger. 
How  deeply  it  affects  those  who  live  with  it  all 
history  can  tell. 

Likewise  the  mountains  in  their  sublime  alti- 
tudes are  capable  of  moving  men's  hearts  and 
minds  to  the  utmost.  They  have  a  character  of 
their  own  as  much  as  the  sea.  Whole  nations  have 
lived  with  the  mountains  and  drawn  their  character 
from  them. 

To  the  man  from  a  different  environment  the 
plains  seem  monotonous.  Their  wide  expanse, 
their  level  horizon,  do  not  make  an  instant  impres- 
sion. Yet  the  men  and  women  who  live  there  know 
that  this  wide  unbroken  circle  of  horizon  which  the 
eye  can  barely  reach,  speaks  to  the  mind  always  of 
infinity.  Nothing  could  be  wider  and  nothing  could 
appeal  more  to  the  imagination.  Nothing  could 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

assist  more  in  the  enlargement  of  humanity.  When 
these  wide  plains  are  beautifully  spangled  with 
native  flowers,  when  they  are  swept  into  billows  by 
summer  winds,  when  they  are  capped  by  rolling 
mountains  of  cloud,  when  they  are  ablaze  with  great 
prairie  fires,  when  they  take  on  any  of  their  other 
native  aspects  they  become  tremendous,  they  pre- 
sent magnificent  and  tragic  spectacles  which  leave 
the  human  mind  as  profoundly  moved  as  it  can  ever 
be  by  the  sea  or  mountains.  Yes,  the  plains  must 
always  be  reckoned  as  one  of  the  great  types  of 
landscape. 

The  forests  are  more  friendly  and  familiar. 
There  is  more  of  the  feeling  of  domesticity  about 
them.  It  is  a  strange  fact  that  in  the  early  set- 
tlement of  America  pioneers  who  had  their  choice 
avoided  the  prairies  and  settled  first  among  the  for- 
ests, even  though  they  were  there  compelled  to  clear 
away  the  trees  with  infinite  labor  to  make  fields 
for  farming.  The  natural  human  love  for  the 
forest  landscape  needs  nothing  more  than  mention. 
It  is  worth  while  to  recall,  however,  how  this  has 
been  put  to  special  use  in  such  enterprises  as  the 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

"forest  cure."  It  is  well  known  that  many  sana- 
toria have  been  established  in  the  forests  and  that 
thousands  of  men  and  women  have  found  life  and 
health  simply  in  being  exposed  to  the  healing  in- 
fluence of  the  crowded  trees. 

Besides  these  four  main  types  of  landscape,  there 
are  minor  types  of  considerable  importance.  There 
are  great  rivers  which  throughout  their  entire 
courses  completely  dominate  the  landscape.  They 
establish  its  character.  Any  one  who  is  to  know 
the  landscape  should  know  some  of  the  great  riv- 
ers and  should  have  felt  their  spell. 

The  little  brooks  too  are  well  worthy  of  acquaint- 
ance. As  they  sing  and  gurgle  down  through  the 
forests  or  roar  down  the  mountainside,  they  too  have 
a  story  to  tell.  It  is  a  story  to  which  every  man 
and  woman  ought  to  listen. 

There  are  many  sections  of  country  which  could 
not  be  called  mountainous,  but  which  are  charac- 
terized by  their  rolling  hills.  Such  hilly  country, 
whether  found  in  central  New  York,  Missouri,  or 
Bohemia,  has  a  character  of  its  own.  It  is  neither 
plains  nor  mountains,  but  a  kind  of  human  com- 

37 

73948 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

promise.  These  hills  are  good  to  live  with.  They 
support  large  populations.  They  are  mild  and 
pleasant  without  being  so  tragic  as  the  sea  or  moun- 
tains. For  this  reason  they  are  psychologically 
better  for  daily  human  association.  If  one  is  a 
real  lover  of  the  landscape  he  will  not  seek  always 
for  the  extreme  and  spectacular  types.  One  of  the 
greatest  qualities  in  all  art  is  restraint  and  the  will- 
ingness to  accept  a  moderate  expression  of  feeling. 
This  quality  of  moderation  is  expressed  in  the  roll- 
ing hill  country  characteristic  of  wide  sections  on 
every  continent.  It  is  a  type  of  landscape  which 
has  been  too  much  neglected, — that  is,  there  has 
been  little  attempt  to  understand  its  spiritual  sig- 
nificance. 

In  some  districts  the  character  of  the  landscape 
is  taken  from  its  lakes.  One  whole  section  of  Eng- 
land is  called  the  Lake  Country.  The  magnificent 
territory  bordering  on  Lake  Champlain,  whatever 
its  topography  and  its  other  beauties,  must  ren- 
der chief  homage  to  the  incomparable  lake.  The 
lover  of  the  landscape  ought  also  to  know  some 
lakes. 


PULLIXG    OVER    THE    RAPIDS 

Photograph  by  the  Author 


IXFORMAT.    COMPOSITTOX.       GROrXDS    OF    THE     MASSACHTSETTS    AGRICULTURAL 
COLLEGE 

Designed  and  executed  by  the  Author 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

Everywhere  where  men  live  the  landscape  has 
been  more  or  less  changed.  Where  considerable 
populations  have  become  established  the  landscape 
is  much  subdued.  The  most  fertile  countries  are 
fully  developed  in  farming  lands.  In  some  places 
the  forests  have  been  cut  away.  In  others  the  prai- 
ries have  been  obliterated.  In  place  of  forests  and 
prairies  there  are  now  checkered  fields  of  corn  and 
wheat  interspersed  with  orchards  and  pastures. 
This  agricultural  landscape,  however,  has  an  effec- 
tive appeal  of  its  own.  It  is  not  unfair  to  say  that 
it  is  quite  as  beautiful  as  the  native  landscape  which 
it  has  supplanted.  This  type  of  landscape  also 
has  been  widely  overlooked.  The  American  peo- 
ple especially  have  not  felt  its  beauty  nor  under- 
stood its  significance.  In  the  old  country  civili- 
zation has  done  better.  In  England  there  is  a  lively 
and  conscious  love  of  the  cultivated  landscape,  for 
practically  all  England  is  cultivated.  In  the  Ger- 
man language  the  same  feeling  is  recognized  in  the 
settled  term  Kultur-Landschaft.  Doubtless,  we  in 
America  will  presently  come  to  a  similar  under- 
standing of  the  beauty  of  well  farmed  country,  and 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

will  learn  to  love  the  farm  landscape  and  to  realize 
its  deeper  spiritual  significance. 

The  student  and  lover  of  the  landscape  must  not 
only  cultivate  its  acquaintance,  he  must  especially 
seek  what  is  beautiful  in  this  outdoor  world.  He 
must  discriminate.  He  must  find  the  best  and  give 
his  chiefest  homage  to  that. 

It  is  one  of  the  first  requirements  in  art,  though 
often  overlooked,  that  one  must  find  the  best  and 
associate  with  it  chiefly.  The  beginner  spends  too 
much  time  criticizing  what  is  bad  or  trying  to  im- 
prove what  is  indifferent.  The  artist  will  find 
beauty  in  many  places  where  thoughtless  or  un- 
trained persons  overlook  it;  but  wherever  he  may 
have  to  search,  he  will  look  only  for  what  is  good, 
dismissing  from  his  attention  as  quickly  as  possi- 
ble everything  squalid  or  disorderly  or  ugly. 

Now  this  exercise  of  seeking  out  whatever  is  best 
in  the  landscape  and  fixing  the  attention  on  that, 
is  a  perfectly  simple  undertaking  and  can  be 
practiced  by  children.  For  some  years  I  have  ex- 
perimented with  this  method  of  instruction  in  the 
public  schools.  The  method  is  of  enough  impor- 


40 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

tance  to  bear  restatement.*    A  set  of  landscape  ex- 
ercises is  made  up,  each  one  of  which  calls  direct 
attention  to  some  beautiful  feature. 
Here  are  sample  exercises : 

No.  1.  Trees.  Where  is  the  finest  tree  in  town? 
What  kind  of  a  tree  is  it?  How  old?  What  is  its 
history? 

No.  2.  Views.  Where  is  the  best  view  or  outlook 
in  town?  What  can  you  see  from  this  point?  How 
might  this  view  be  improved? 

And  so  on.  The  characteristic  feature  of  each  ex- 
ercise is  that  it  sends  the  pupil  to  seek  something 
beautiful,  it  leads  him  to  consider  carefully  the  re- 
lationships which  influence  its  effect,  it  helps  him  to 
make  comparisons,  while  appealing  frankly  to  his 
personal  preference  (and  this  is  fundamentally  im- 
portant), it  urges  on  his  thought  some  reasons  for 
his  opinion. 

When  a  series  of  such  exercises,  carefully 
planned  and  fairly  superintended,  are  carried  out 
in  school,  they  lead  to  a  pretty  thorough  acquaint- 

*  This  plan  of  school  instruction  is  more  fully  stated  in 
my  book  "The  Landscape  Beautiful." 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

ance  with  the  local  landscape,  always  with  empha- 
sis on  the  features  of  greatest  beauty.  This  con- 
stitutes genuine  art  education,  and  also  it  exempli- 
fies the  kind  of  acquaintanceship  with  the  landscape 
which  is  fundamentally  necessary  to  the  man  or 
woman  who  would  know  what  the  natural  style  of 
landscape  gardening  means. 


FORM  AND   SPIRIT 

OUR  definition  of  the  natural  style  of  land- 
scape gardening  recognizes  both  form  and 
spirit.  We  have  said  that  it  is  a  method  of 
landscape  gardening  in  which  the  natural  forms  of 
landscape  are  used  and  imbued  with  the  spirit  of 
the  native  landscape.  It  ought  to  be  perfectly 
clear  that  both  form  and  spirit  are  everywhere 
requisite.  It  is  altogether  possible  to  separate  the 
two;  but  the  form  without  the  spirit  is  a  mere 
corpse,  empty  and  disappointing,  while  the  spirit 
disembodied  is  a  mere  ghost — the  dream  of  some 
artist's  imagination — perhaps  a  dream  which  the 
artist  is  too  lazy  or  too  untrained  to  realize  in  physi- 
cal form. 

It  ought  to  be  obvious  further,  as  a  sort  of  art 
axiom,  that  there  should  always  be  a  close  corre- 
spondence between  form  and  spirit.  Certain  forms 
are  best  adapted  to  express  certain  ideas  or  emo- 
tions. In  architecture  the  church  form,  with  its 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

gothic  windows  and  its  towering  spire,  expresses  a 
religious  thought;  the  business  block,  with  its  wide 
doors  and  its  show  windows,  expresses  a  commercial 
idea;  the  state  capitol,  with  its  columned  porches 
and  its  rounded  dome,  expresses  a  civic  feeling.  So 
in  landscape  architecture,  the  big  formal  garden 
carries  the  spirit  of  the  courtly  life  which  once  filled 
Schoenbrunn  and  Versailles ;  the  snug,  walled  Eng- 
lish garden  expresses  the  feeling  of  the  home-loving, 
garden-loving  English  countryman ;  the  bold  "front 
yard"  of  the  American  suburbs,  set  out  with  one 
blue  spruce  and  one  weeping  mountain  ash,  ex- 
presses the  crude  taste,  the  ostentation,  the  desire 
for  public  show,  of  the  bourgeois  suburbanite. 

But  let  us  first  consider  form.  It  has  been  said, 
though  hastily  and  untruthfully,  that  the  natural 
landscape  has  no  form  and  no  composition.  The 
fact  is  that  it  has  very  definite  forms,  very  distinct 
and  clear-cut  types  and  very  rigid  principles  of  com- 
position. 

These  are  founded  on  the  most  fundamental  prin- 
ciples of  physics, — such  simple  principles,  for  ex- 
ample, as  that  water  runs  down  hill  and  that  trees 


44. 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

grow  straight  up.  According  to  the  former  prin- 
ciple it  is  determined  that  all  lakes  shall  be  in 
depressed  areas  and  that  all  rivers  shall  occupy  the 
valleys  instead  of  the  hilltops.  This  obvious  rule  is 
in  fact  some  times  violated  in  so-called  landscape 
gardening.  Numerous  examples  might  be  men^ 
tioned  of  ambitious  park  makers  who  have  put  lakes 
at  the  tops  of  hills  in  order  that  the  river  might 
come  dashing  down  the  cheap  artificial  slope, 
though  the  whole  intelligence  instantly  revolts, 
knowing  that  no  river,  or  brook  even,  could  ever 
occupy  such  a  position. 

Other  important  principles  of  natural  landscape 
composition  that  may  be  mentioned  in  illustration 
are  these:  That  hills  and  mountains  are  always 
wider  at  their  bases  than  at  their  tops ;  that  moun- 
tains tend  to  stand  in  ranks  or  ranges ;  that  prairies 
are  nearly  always  flat;  that  slow  rivers  have  wide 
valleys,  while  swift  water  runs  in  narrow  valleys; 
that  trees  and  all  other  vegetation  are  larger  and 
denser  in  the  valleys,  shrinking  in  size  and  impor- 
tance as  we  rise  in  altitude. 

So  we  might  go  on  with  a  very  considerable  in- 


45 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

ventory  of  principles,  every  one  of  which  exercises 
a  quite  decided  influence  upon  the  forms  of  native 
landscape.  It  will  answer  the  present  purpose, 
however,  to  point  out  that  these  are  the  simple  prin- 
ciples of  physics  as  expressed  in  geology  and  physi- 
cal geography.  In  order,  therefore,  to  understand 
the  unit  forms  of  natural  landscape  we  must  know 
something  of  geology  and  of  physical  geography. 
One  then  grasps  the  landscape  result  along  with 
the  geologic  cause.  It  is  plain  that  the  Berkshire 
Hills  must  have  rounded  tops  because  they  were 
ground  down  by  the  glaciers,  while  the  Rocky 
Mountains  will  have  acute  tops  because  they  are 
recently  broken  up  by  volcanic  action  and  have 
never  been  eroded  at  the  peaks.  It  is  plain  that  the 
sand  dunes  of  Lake  Michigan  and  New  Jersey 
must  lie  in  billows;  that  great  areas  of  the  lower 
Mississippi  Valley  must  be  in  swamps;  and  that 
the  west  slope  of  the  Cascade  range  will  support 
a  very  different  flora  from  the  dry  east  slope. 

These  great  geologic  forces  are  then  the  deter- 
mining factors  in  the  formation  of  all  the  great 
natural  types  of  landscape  as  enumerated  in  Chap- 

46 


IX    THE    BERKSHIRE    HILLS 

Photograph  by  R.  E.  Schouler 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

ter  II.  These  landscape  types  are  in  fact  so  many 
natural  landscape  forms.  We  should  further  no- 
tice especially  that  each  of  these  forms  has  its  own 
spirit.  It  is  almost  impossible  to  speak  of  the 
mountains  without  thinking  of  the  spirit  of  the 
mountains  as  well  as  of  their  physical  form.  Dr. 
Wilhelm  Miller  has  recently  published  a  notable 
treatise  on  "The  Prairie  Spirit  in  Landscape  Gar- 
dening," which  deals,  as  a  matter  of  course,  with 
both  the  physical  prairie  and  the  spirit  of  the  plains. 
While  topography,  the  main  element  of  the  nat- 
ural landscape,  is  determined  chiefly  by  geologic 
factors,  vegetation,  the  element  of  second  import- 
ance, is  determined  largely  by  present  climatic  con- 
ditions and  is  to  be  understood  therefore  by  ref- 
erence to  the  teachings  of  physical  geography.  At 
this  time  I  do  not  wish  to  enter  into  any  lengthy 
discussion  of  these  geologic  and  geographic  data, 
but  merely  to  make  it  clear  that  the  natural  land- 
scape does  present  perfectly  definite  and  recog- 
nizable forms  determined  by  perfectly  simple  and 
well-known  forces.  The  question  of  vegetation, 
however,  and  its  relation  to  landscape  forms  de- 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

serve  some  further  consideration. 

In  practical  landscape  gardening  the  develop- 
ment of  the  natural  style  has  always  been  deeply 
involved  with  questions  of  planting — with  the  choice 
and  management  of  species.  Indeed,  these  ideas 
have  comprised  the  whole  sum  and  substance,  the 
beginning  and  the  end,  the  body  and  the  meaning, 
of  the  natural  style  in  many  minds. 

Unquestionably  the  selection  and  management  of 
the  plant  materials  does  play  a  major  role  in  practi- 
cal landscape  gardening,  and  especially  in  the  natu- 
ral style.  The  fact  that  topography,  at  least  in  its 
main  features,  is  beyond  the  reach  of  the  landscape 
maker  leaves  him  under  the  necessity  of  falling  back 
to  what  is  in  reality  this  secondary  position.  But 
since  it  is  necessary,  no  matter  what  the  reasons, 
to  produce  our  principal  results  through  our  plant- 
ings, it  becomes  doubly  necessary  to  study  this 
part  of  our  work  with  the  utmost  care. 

We  must  have,  not  merely  a  facile  familiarity 
with  plants,  but  we  must  have  some  fairly  pro- 
found philosophy  of  their  use.  That  is,  we  must  be 
able  to  use  plants  as  nature  uses  them,  to  found 


48 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

our  selections  and  our  groupings  on  the  same  fun- 
damental laws  which  govern  these  matters  in  the 
wild  and  native  landscape. 

Many  partial  philosophies  have  been  offered  in 
this  connection.  Every  one  seems  to  be  sound,  as 
far  as  it  goes.  We  may  say,  therefore,  that  they 
are  all  true,  and  for  practical  use  we  may  add  them 
all  together  and  adopt  the  total.  A  brief  review 
of  these  different  ideas  will  be  worth  while  here. 

1.  The  use  of  native  species  in  preference  to  ex- 
otics began  to  be  urged  strongly  in  America  about 
1890.    Downing's  theory  of  the  natural  style  which 
had  prevailed  up  to  this  time  had  endeavored  to 
use  the  forms  of  the  natural  landscape  without 
the  native  materials.     This  preference  for  native 
plants,  however,  was  reinforced  by  many  argu- 
ments, some  of  them  very  questionable,  until  it  be- 
came a  sort  of  fad.    It  was,  therefore,  only  in  part 
an  effort  to  realize  a  more  perfectly  natural  style 
of  gardening. 

2.  Very  soon,  however,  appeared  the  idea  of  mass 
planting.    This  seems  to  have  been  the  special  con- 
tribution of  Frederick  Law  Olmsted,  Sr.    It  repre- 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

sents  a  most  substantial  advance,  since  nature  mani- 
festly offers  her  plantings  nearly  always  in  large 
masses.  The  white  pine,  for  instance,  used  to  ex- 
ist in  solid  unbroken  forest  masses  hundreds  of 
miles  in  extent.  There  used  to  be  thousands  of 
miles  of  prairie  in  this  country  covered  with  blue 
stem  and  bunch  grass. 

3.  Nature's  mass  plantings,  however,  are  con- 
trolled by  very  well  settled  conditions  of  soil  and 
moisture.  A  mass  planting  of  high-bush  blue-ber- 
ries or  of  New  Jersey  tea,  for  example,  cannot  be 
made  indifferently  anywhere  the  landscape  gar- 
dener may  choose.  The  blueberries  are  at  home, 
native  and  natural,  only  in  wet,  springy  or  half- 
swampy  land;  and  the  New  Jersey  tea  belongs 
characteristically  on  dry  warm  sandy  banks.  So 
our  mass  plantings,  if  they  are  to  be  true  to  the 
pattern  of  nature,  must  be  placed  with  strict  ref- 
erence to  soil  and  drainage  conditions.  This  part 
of  planting  theory  seems  to  have  been  set  forth 
first  and  most  clearly  by  Dr.  Engler  and  Dr.  Pe- 
ters, respectively  curator  and  planting  foreman  of 
the  new  Botanic  garden  of  Berlin. 


50 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

4.  Another  discovery  of  still  more  recent  date 
calls  to  our  aid  that  branch  of  botanical  science 
known  as  ecology.  It  is  readily  observed  that  very 
few  species  of  plants  exist  in  nature  alone.  Prac- 
tically every  one  associates  habitually  with  certain 
other  species.  Thus  they  form  set  clubs  or  societies. 
And  these  friendly  associations,  based  upon  simi- 
larity of  tastes  and  complementary  habits  of 
growth,  should  not  be  broken  up.  If  we  as  land- 
scape gardeners  desire  to  preserve  the  whole  aspect 
of  nature,  with  all  its  forms  intact,  we  will  keep  all 
plants  in  their  proper  social  groupings. 

For  example,  if  we  wish  to  use  the  gray  birch, 
or  squaw  birch,  to  give  a  good  naturalistic  dress 
to  some  dry  hillside,  we  will  not  leave  it  alone,  but 
will  use  its  whole  society,  the  roll  of  which  is  some- 
what as  follows: 

SQUAW   BIRCH    SOCIETY 

Squaw  Birch,  Gray  Birch,  Eetula  populifolia. 
Dwarf  Savin,  Dwarf  Juniper,  Juniperus  corn- 
munis. 

Black  Huckleberry,  Gaylussacia  baccata. 


51 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

Sweet  Fern,  Myrica  asplenifolia. 
Sumach,  Rhus  glabra  and  copalUna. 

Or  if  we  have  a  wide  stretch  of  barren  sandy 
plain  in  Massachusetts,  we  will  probably  adopt  the 
pitch  pine  flora,  which  is  characteristic  of  such  land. 
Its  main  features  are  as  follows: 

PITCH   PINE   SOCIETY 

Pitch  Pine,  Pinus  rigida. 
Scrub  Oak,  Quercus  prinoides. 
Black  Scrub  Oak,  Quercus  ilicifoUa. 
Poverty  Grass,  Andropogon  scoparius. 

This  ecological  principle  is  the  one  most  clearly 
elucidated  by  Willy  Lange  in  his  important  work, 
"Die  Garten-Gestaltung  der  Neuzeit." 

Looking  at  the  landscape  from  these  different 
points  of  view,  we  gradually  gain  familiarity  with 
its  various  forms.  We  learn  to  know  the  shape  of 
the  mountains,  the  forms  of  the  trees,  the  slope  of 
the  terraces  on  the  river  banks.  If  we  have  within 
us  any  spiritual  nature  we  learn  at  the  same  time 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

something  of  the  spirit  of  the  landscape.  This  is 
obviously  something  much  harder  to  define  or  de- 
scribe. I  cannot  say  to  every  man,  lo,  here  is  the 
spirit  of  the  woods !  or  look  now  at  the  water  where 
you  shall  behold  the  naked  spirit  of  the  lake. 

Nevertheless  there  is  a  spirit  of  the  woods  and 
a  spirit  of  the  lake,  and  the  spiritually  minded  per- 
son will  certainly  discern  them.  Even  the  dullest 
man  has  so  much  of  the  divine  essence  in  him  that 
he  cannot  wholly  escape  it.  He  may  look  on  with 
the  cow  at  the  same  fields  and  views,  and  though 
she  gets  her  dinner  from  them  he  will  get  some- 
thing more  and  different. 

It  is  plain,  furthermore,  that  this  spiritual  or 
emotional  product  of  the  landscape  takes  a  spe- 
cific quality  from  its  physical  form.  The  emotions 
communicated  to  the  human  heart  from  the  ocean 
are  not  the  same  as  those  given  by  the  brook.  Our 
spirits  are  moved  in  one  way  by  the  pine  forest  and 
in  a  very  different  way  by  the  prairies.  The  bank 
of  blue  blossoming  lupines  means  one  thing  to  us 
and  the  thundering  waterfall  means  quite  another. 
Yet  these  spiritual,  emotional  products  can  hardly 


53 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

be  described  aside  from  the  physical  forms  and  phe- 
nomena through  which  they  are  expressed.  So 
poor  are  we  in  the  nomenclature  of  the  spirit. 

This  poverty  of  language,  sad  as  it  is,  is  no  new 
matter,  and  it  need  not  detain  us  now  if  we  only 
understand  that  the  absence  of  words  does  not  mean 
a  lack  of  facts.  The  spiritual  portion  of  the  world 
is  still  there,  just  as  truly  as  the  physical  portion. 
Probably  it  is  more  powerful,  more  significant  and 
much  longer  lived. 

Before  men  became  civilized  into  their  present 
infidelity  and  materialism,  our  landscape  was  in- 
habited by  wild  Indians — the  "savage"  aborigines. 
These  simple  citizens  lived  much  nearer  to  nature 
than  we  do  and  understood  her  a  great  deal  better. 
It  is  a  curious  fact  that  their  thought  of  nature 
was  an  extravagant  spiritualism,  almost  as  extreme, 
though  never  as  crude,  as  our  modern  materialism. 
But  there  is  every  reason  to  suppose  that  they  were 
nearer  right  than  we  are. 

Any  direct  attempt  to  capture  the  spirit  of  the 
landscape  hardly  promises  success.  Yet,  beginning 
with  this  clear  understanding  of  the  existence  of 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

such  a  spirit,  and  living  in  the  constant  thought  of 
learning  from  that  great  Mother  Spirit,  we  may  be 
perfectly  sure  of  making  some  progress.  Growth 
in  spiritual  discernment  and  in  spiritual  power  is 
just  as  natural  to  a  sane  man  as  growth  in  bulk  is 
to  a  healthy  boy. 

A  great  deal  depends  on  taking  the  proper  atti- 
tude,— on  looking  always  for  the  spiritual  signifi- 
cance of  the  landscape — on  thinking  of  it  in  spirit- 
ual terms — in  living  the  life  of  the  spirit  in  happy 
association  with  the  dual  world  (spirit  and  matter 
blended)  about  us, — a  world  in  which  we  are  our- 
selves characteristic  and  integral. 

Every  effort  is  worth  while,  of  course,  which 
will  enable  us  to  grasp  more  firmly  our  own  emo- 
tional experience.  We  want  to  clarify  our  own 
feelings  derived  from  the  landscape.  We  can  al- 
ways find  help  in  this  direction  from  any  of  the 
arts,  since  all  of  them  draw  their  inspiration  from 
nature.  Literature  is  full  of  this  spirit,  especially 
the  sounder  portions  of  the  modern  nature  litera- 
ture. Careful  reading  in  this  field  will  help  be- 
cause it  will  show  us  what  response  good  men  and 


55 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

good  women  have  made  to  the  appeals  of  the  land- 
scape spirit. 

For  about  two  generations  the  painters,  like  the 
poets,  have  dealt  honestly  with  the  landscape,  en- 
deavoring to  get  from  it  the  truth  of  nature  rather 
than  trying  to  fix  upon  it  their  preconceived  super- 
stitions. It  hardly  needs  to  be  said  that  every  na- 
ture painter  is  trying  to  do  more  than  to  record 
the  mere  physical  features  of  the  landscape.  Every 
one  of  them  is  trying,  with  all  the  power  there  is 
in  him,  to  offer  us  also  a  spiritual  message.  It  is, 
therefore,  greatly  worth  our  while,  as  lovers  of  the 
landscape,  as  believers  in  spiritual  things,  and  as 
would-be  landscape  architects,  to  see  what  the  paint- 
ers have  to  offer. 

After  a  good  many  years  of  study  and  teach- 
ing, however,  I  am  inclined  to  believe  that  music 
offers  the  readiest  approach  to  a  spiritual  inter- 
pretation of  the  landscape.  Music  has  so  slight  a 
physical  body  that  very  few  persons  are  troubled 
by  it.  Even  the  stupidest  publican  understands 
that  music  is  addressed  straight  to  his  spirit.  If  he 
gets  anything  from  it  it  must  be  some  emotional 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

effect.  The  emotional  or  spiritual  quantity  in  mu- 
sic is  particularly  evident. 

Moreover,  the  emotions  aroused  by  music  are 
singularly  like  these  aroused  by  the  landscape.  One 
hears  a  ringing  Sousa  march,  and  one  experiences 
the  fine  martial  emotions  that  one  feels  of  a  brisk 
October  morning  as  one  spins  down  the  street  in 
the  automobile  between  the  double  row  of  stately 
maples.  Or  one  listens  to  Mischa  Elman  play  the 
Dvofak  Humoresque — to  take  another  trite  exam- 
ple— and  one  feels  the  homesick  longing  expressed 
by  Tom  Sawyer  who  sat  on  the  hills  in  springtime 
and  looked  across  the  valleys  and  yearned  and 
yearned  and  wanted  to  cry  but  couldn't  think  of 
anything  to  cry  about. 

So  direct  is  this  parallelism  between  music  and 
the  landscape  that  for  some  years  I  have  been  in 
the  habit  of  using  music  to  arouse  the  imaginations 
of  my  students  in  landscape  gardening.  It  is  ab- 
solutely essential,  of  course,  that  their  imaginations 
be  aroused — that  they  be  trained  in  the  habit  of 
landscape  feeling.  So  I  play  them  on  the  Victrola 
the  best  records  that  are  made — the  Sextet  from 


57 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

Lucia,  the  Wedding  March  from  Lohengrin,  Haen- 
del's  Largo,  and  even  some  symphonic  selections, 
and  then  I  require  them  to  return  to  me  programs 
of  landscapes  which  would  awaken  the  same  sen- 
timents. The  exercise  is  perfectly  simple  and  prac- 
tical, and  gives  better  and  more  uniform  results 
than  many  of  the  experiments  in  chemistry. 

Any  one  will  find  it  profitable  to  use  music  in 
this  way,  and  to  practice  himself  in  the  interpre- 
tation of  music  into  landscape  and  landscape  into 
music.  It  does  not  require  any  special  musical  edu- 
cation any  more  than  it  demands  a  specialized  edu- 
cation in  landscape. 

In  spite  of  our  abject  poverty  of  spiritual  lan- 
guage, it  may  be  worth  while  for  us  before  drop- 
ping this  subject  to  try  to  specify  some  of  the  spirit- 
ual elements  or  products  of  landscape. 

And  first  of  all  the  landscape  breathes  with  the 
spirit  of  life.  There  may  be  a  perfectly  dead  land- 
scape on  the  moon,  but  that  is  not  our  planet. 
Our  world  teems  with  life.  From  the  infinitesi- 
mal microbe,  swarming  by  millions  in  the  drop  of 
water,  to  the  crowding  trees  in  the  forest  there  is 


58 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

life — growing,  urgent,  irrepressible  life.  Even  the 
inanimate  ocean  and  the  tumbling  clouds  and  the 
singing  brook  are  so  nearly  alive  that  they  tell  the 
same  story  to  our  listening  ears. 

Then  the  world  is  full  of  energy — of  power. 
From  the  tiniest  insect  boldly  winging  its  course 
against  the  wind,  to  the  storm  waves  of  the  ocean 
grinding  to  powder  the  rocks  on  the  headland,  there 
is  the  expression  of  immeasurable  energy.  The 
wide  sweeping  prairie  wind,  the  crashing  tree  in 
the  forest,  the  roaring  waterfall,  the  spouting  gey- 
ser, all  impress  our  souls  with  the  infinite  power 
which  moves  creation. 

Then  there  is  the  spirit  of  beauty,  as  universal 
and  almost  as  irresistible.  Everywhere  the  world 
is  beautiful.  If  one  were  to  ask  for  a  definition 
of  beauty  we  could  not  do  better  than  show  him  the 
landscape :  that  is  beauty.  Nature  is  the  beauty  by 
which  all  other  beauties  are  measured.  This  qual- 
ity, too,  is  universal.  From  the  most  fragile  snow 
crystal  to  the  highest  mountain  all  is  instinct  with 
the  spirit  of  beauty. 

The  landscape  is  nearly  always  peaceful.    There 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

are  occasional  storms  of  magnificent  fury,  but  as  a 
rule  the  arctic  wastes  and  the  tropical  jungles  are 
both  as  peaceful  as  eternity.  Those  who  seek 
peace  wisely  always  go  to  the  landscape.  Physi- 
cians uniformly  prescribe  the  quiet  country  and  the 
open  landscape  for  their  over-civilized  and  bedev- 
iled patients.  The  worried  man  who  makes  an  ex- 
cuse of  his  trout  rod  to  linger  in  the  solitudes  where 
the  shadows  lie  across  the  pools  knows  this  land- 
scape spirit  of  peace;  and  the  tired  woman  gazing 
out  of  her  window  to  the  purple  of  the  distant  hills 
knows. 

In  the  landscape  is  not  only  peace  but  joy.  It 
is  a  joy  sometimes  so  wild  and  gay  as  almost  to 
contradict  the  spirit  of  peace.  The  rivers  chuckle 
to  themselves  as  they  tumble  over  obstacles  in  their 
way;  the  flowers  burst  with  joyous  bloom;  the  birds 
sing  with  all  their  might  and  main,  and  the  trees  of 
the  forests  clap  their  hands  for  joy.  It  is  enough 
to  dry  the  tears  of  Niobe. 

Yet  even  in  our  moments  of  deepest  vision  and 
highest  ecstasy  the  landscape  is  not  wholly  revealed. 
There  is  always  something  beyond.  Indeed,  this 


60 


EARLY    SPRINGTIME 

Photograph  by  the  Author 


AS    VIEWED    FROM    THE    BRIDGE 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

spirit  of  mystery  is  one  of  the  most  truly  charac- 
teristic qualities  of  the  natural  world.  It  is  a  great 
and  highly  spiritual  quality  wholly  opposed  to  the 
scientific  passion  for  complete  and  classified  knowl- 
edge. Our  generation  has  followed  this  passion  for 
science  to  such  lengths,  has  been  so  wrought  with 
the  ideal  of  discovering  and  publishing  everything, 
that  this  spirit  of  mystery  comes  as  a  greatly  needed 
corrective.  We  shall  never  understand  the  land- 
scape until  we  understand  that  we  can  never  un- 
derstand it  all. 

In  the  story  of  the  creation  it  is  related  that  the 
spirit  of  God  breathed  upon  the  waters.  The  spirit 
of  God  still  breathes  there.  Most  men  find  God 
speaking  to  them  most  directly  from  the  clouds, 
from  the  rain,  from  the  sea  or  from  the  hills.  One 
of  them  said: 

"I  will  look  up  to  the  hills,  whence  cometh  my  help: 
"My  help  cometh  from  the  Lord,  who  made  Heaven 
and  Earth." 

Yes,  quite  plainly,  of  all  the  spirits  moving  in 
the  landscape  the  greatest  is  the  Father  of  all  spir- 
its, the  one  known  to  the  theologians  as  the  Holy 


61 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

Spirit.  But  of  his  progeny  there  are  legions  more. 
Not  only  the  great  spirit  of  life,  the  spirit  of  power, 
the  spirit  of  beauty  and  the  spirit  of  joy,  but  all 
the  lesser  spirits — the  prairie  spirit,  the  spirit  of 
the  pine  woods,  the  spirit  of  the  palmetto  swamps, 
and  all  the  rest — to  every  landscape  its  own  spirit. 
It  is  very,  very  easy  to  conclude  that  the  Indians 
were  right  when  they  thought  of  the  world  as  peo- 
pled with  spirits,  assigning  to  every  tree  and  shrub 
its  living  soul. 

And  so  we  conclude  that  this  physical  world 
which  we  see  (and  which  the  cow  sees)  is  only  a 
part  of  the  landscape.  Within  those  physical 
forms  and  without  them  and  beyond  them  there  are 
corresponding  spiritual  parts  which  form  a  spirit- 
ual landscape  just  as  real  and  even  more  closely 
related  to  our  half -human,  half-divine  souls. 


THE  LANDSCAPE  MOTIVE 

EVERY  work  of  art  should  have  its  subject, 
theme  or  motive.  This  principle  is  suffi- 
ciently obvious.  In  the  natural  style  of 
landscape  gardening,  however,  it  becomes  especially 
important  to  keep  this  principle  in  view,  and  to 
have  some  very  definite  method  for  putting  it  into 
effect.  In  certain  types  of  gardening  it  may  pos- 
sibly answer  to  give  a  general,  more  or  less  vague, 
feeling  of  beauty,  or  of  festivity,  or  of  courtliness, 
but  when  one  essays  the  larger  flights  of  composi- 
tion in  informal  landscape,  it  is  positively  neces- 
sary to  artistic  success  that  some  definite,  concrete 
motive  be  adopted  and  developed. 

Comparisons  with  the  other  arts  are  illuminating 
at  this  point.  The  idea  of  the  theme  or  motive  * 
is  universally  recognized  in  music.  If  we  adopt  the 

*  In  common  studio  patter  this  word  is  always  pronounced 
and  written  motif;  but  since  we  have  a  plain  English  spelling 
for  precisely  the  same  word,  I  prefer  to  spell  it  motive. 


63 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

stronger  form  of  the  idea  which  the  musicians  rec- 
ognize as  the  leit-motiv,  we  shall  have  just  what  the 
landscape  gardener  is  seeking  for  his  art.  It  is 
the  leading  motive  or  theme  of  the  musical  com- 
position which  stands  out  as  its  recognizable  quan- 
tity, which  gives  it  character.  This  leading  motive 
is  introduced  near  the  beginning  of  the  work,  fre- 
quently in  the  very  first  period,  and  is  carried  for- 
ward to  the  finale.  In  the  meantime  it  is  presented 
in  many  different  ways,  sometimes  very  simply, 
sometimes  much  elaborated  and  overlaid  with  or- 
nament, sometimes  changing  keys,  but  always  capa- 
ble of  recognition  as  the  dominating  theme. 

The  comparison  with  literature  is  quite  as  much 
to  the  point.  No  one  would  attempt  to  excuse  a 
literary  essay  which  did  not  promptly  announce 
one  distinct  theme  and  then  stick  strictly  to  it.  In 
successive  paragraphs  of  the  essay  or  sermon  this 
theme  would  be  developed  from  different  points  of 
view  and  would  be  given  different  methods  of  lit- 
erary treatment.  First  it  would  be  stated  in  sim- 
ple terms,  then  it  would  be  illustrated  by  an  ex- 
ample, then  enforced  by  historical  evidence,  then 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

given  the  "human  interest"  treatment  (vox  humana 
stop),  then  touched  off  with  a  funny  story,  then 
brought  to  a  resounding  climax.  But  all  the  way 
through,  and  in  every  paragraph,  the  theme — the 
leading  motive — would  stand  out  clearly  and  con- 
trol the  meaning  of  every  word. 

This  comparison  is  the  more  valuable  because 
the  informal  type  of  landscape  composition  bears 
so  many  resemblances  to  prose  composition  in  lit- 
erature. The  formal  garden  might  be  likened  to 
poetry.  Each  line  has  just  so  many  feet;  each 
part  is  formally  balanced  by  another  exactly  cor- 
responding part.  In  poetry  it  is  much  less  neces- 
sary than  in  prose  to  develop  a  definite  and  didactic 
theme.  The  form  may  be  so  beautiful  in  its  obvi- 
ous perfections  that  a  mere  vague  feeling  of  beauty 
or  of  mystery  or  of  human  passion  may  suffice.  It 
is  not  at  all  necessary  to  reach  any  specific  con- 
clusions. But  the  prose  writer  and  the  naturalis- 
tic landscape  gardener  can  not  depend  on  these 
things, — the  forms  with  which  they  deal  are  not  suf- 
ficiently obvious  to  be  admired  on  their  own  ac- 
count; more  attention  must  be  given  to  content, 


65 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

and  content  must  be  presented  in  a  logical,  under- 
standable way. 

Now  sound  prose  writing  depends  absolutely  on 
two  principles,  videlicit,  first,  on  unity  of  theme, 
and,  second,  on  paragraphic  structure.  It  is  now 
our  purpose  to  develop  these  two  principles  in  their 
application  to  the  naturalistic  form  of  landscape 
gardening. 

The  landscape  motive  may  be  defined  as  the  cen- 
tral subject  matter  of  each  composition.  This  defi- 
nition should  specifically  include  both  form  and 
spirit,  for  the  landscape  motive  should  present  a 
tangible  physical  unit  clearly  expressive  of  the  dom- 
inating spirit  of  the  whole  work. 

This  definition  is  illustrated  in  the  comparisons 
already  made  between  the  subject,  text  or  topic  in 
literature,  the  theme  or  motive  in  music,  and  the 
leading  motive  in  landscape.  The  idea  can  be  made 
clearer,  however,  and  further  illustrated,  by  giving 
a  few  examples  of  landscape  motives. 

The  oak-tree  motive:  On  the  low  rolling  hills 
of  the  central  Mississippi  basin,  perhaps  most  typi- 
cally in  Missouri,  are  miles  and  miles  of  scattered 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

oaks.  These  give  the  country  its  character.  They 
are  the  natural  landscape  motive.  As  such  they 
could  be  readily  adopted  by  the  artist  designing  a 
naturalistic  park  reserve  in  this  country.  It  would 
then  become  his  opportunity  to  present  the  beauty 
of  the  oak  trees  from  as  many  points  of  view  and  in 
as  many  different  ways  as  possible. 

The  Florida  pine-tree  motive :  In  central  Flor- 
ida the  tall,  straight,  sparsely  scattered  pine  trees 
dominate  the  landscape.  Here  they  are  always  as- 
sociated with  the  scrub  palmetto,  forming  an  eco- 
logical group  (see  page  51)  which,  however,  may 
still  be  called  the  pine-tree  motive. 

The  birch-tree  motive :  On  the  dry  hill-side  pas- 
tures of  New  England  the  birches  are  very  much 
at  home.  The  squaw  birch,  or  gray  birch,  in  par- 
ticular may  be  accepted  as  the  most  characteristic 
plant.  It  is  usually  associated  with  other  plants 
(see  page  51),  and  these  together  form  a  great 
variety  of  effective  pictures.  The  young  sprouts, 
the  crowded  young  trees,  the  graceful  mature 
groups,  or  the  hoary  old  specimens  are  all  beautiful, 
so  that  the  development  of  the  birch  tree  idea  has 


67 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

alluring  possibilities. 

The  sunflower  motive :  My  own  little  garden  is 
dominated  by  its  sunflowers.  This  is  partly  a  rem- 
iniscence of  Kansas,  and  doubtless  also  partly  an 
expression  of  my  own  weedy  philosophy.  What- 
ever the  primary  reason  for  having  those  sunflow- 
ers there  no  one  could  ever  think  of  that  garden 
without  its  sunflowers.  It  has  other  things  in  it 
— plenty  of  them, — but  it  is  essentially  a  sunflower 
garden, — it  is  dominated  by  the  sunflower  motive. 

The  hollyhock  motive :  In  Vermont,  on  the 
shores  of  Lake  Champlain,  I  know  a  fine  substan- 
tial dignified  old-fashioned  stone  farmhouse.  About 
it  is  a  comfortable  lawn  space  set  off  by  a  low  picket 
fence  from  the  encroachments  of  the  farmyard. 
Along  the  foundations  of  this  comfortable  old  house 
and  also  close  up  against  the  picket  fence  runs  a 
border  of  hollyhocks.  There  may  or  may  not  be 
other  things  growing  in  that  garden — I  don't  re- 
member. To  me  it  is  always  a  garden  of  holly- 
hocks. 

The  river  motive :  Wherever  a  river  threads  its 
way  through  a  landscape  it  is  pretty  sure  to  carry 


68 


The  Natural  Style  in  landscape  Gardening 

with  it  the  dominating  landscape  theme.  Count- 
less beautiful  views  show  up  and  down  its  stretches. 
Masses  of  hills  or  trees  come  into  view  at  every 
bend.  Endless  pictures  are  reflected  in  its  quiet 
reaches,  and  endless  songs  go  up  from  its  rocky 
riffles.  Any  park  lying  along  almost  any  river 
would  quite  certainly  be  dominated  by  the  river 
motive. 

In  the  Muddy  Brook  Parkway,  Boston,  Mr. 
Frederick  Law  Olmsted,  Sr.,  gave  us  a  small  but 
highly  refined  example  of  this  type  of  landscape 
motive. 

The  prairie  motive:  Personally,  just  to  satisfy 
my  own  artistic  aspirations,  I  would  like  to  make  a 
prairie  park.  I  would  like  to  have  a  few  miles  of 
perfectly  flat  land  in  Central  or  Western  Kansas, 
and  I  would  like  to  have  it  lie  where  the  level  hori- 
zon would  form  an  unbroken  circle  some  fifteen 
miles  in  radius.  This  level  line  would  be  my  mo- 
tive, and  I  would  put  in  only  enough  upright  lines 
to  give  the  little  necessary  artistic  contrast  and  to 
supply  a  scale  of  distances.  I  would  have  a  lawn 
of  buffalo  grass  furnished  with  the  exceptionally 


69 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

rich  and  interesting  flora  of  that  section, — Anem- 
one Carolina,  Astragalus  missouriensis,  Baptisia 
australis,  Salvia  grandiflora,  Asclepias  varticillata, 
Tradescantia  virginica,  and  never  forgetting  Opun- 
tia  rafinesquii.  Here  a  man  might  stand  quietly 
in  the  center  of  a  stable  horizontal  world  with  crea- 
tion all  open  around  and  above  him,  with  himself 
the  center  of  it, — the  very  type  of  our  whole  north- 
ern anthropocentric  philosophy. 

The  Connecticut  motive:  This  reference  to  the 
prairie  motive  introduces  us  to  a  much  more  com- 
plex notion,  the  motive  made  up  of  several  ele- 
ments, the  relationships  of  which  may  fluctuate 
from  paragraph  to  paragraph.  I  once  heard  an  art 
critic  say  of  certain  paintings  that  they  looked  very 
Connecticut.  The  landscape  gardener  who  could 
make  a  park  look  very  Connecticut  would  plainly 
be  obliged  to  use  the  Connecticut  motive.  This  mo- 
tive would  be  a  compound  of  several  simple  ele- 
ments, such  as 

a.  Low  rounded  hills. 

b.  Scattering  forest  of  mixed  chestnut,  oak 
and  pine. 


70 


OX    MOUNT    TOBY,    MASSACHUSETTS 

Photograph  by  the  Author 


NATURALISTIC    COMPOSITION.       GROUNDS    OF   THE    MASSACHUSETTS    AGRICUL- 
TURAL   COLLEGE 

Planned,  executed  and  photographed  by  the  Author 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

c.  Undergrowth  of  laurel. 

d.  Marginal  growth  of  birch,  dogwoods  and 
viburnums. 

e.  Half-open  pastures  with  red  cedars. 

This  Connecticut  landscape  then  becomes  a  theme 
of  unlimited  possibilities.  It  may  be  given  more 
liberal,  diversified  and  intricate  treatment  than  the 
pine-tree  motive,  and  it  will  necessarily  be  much 
harder  to  carry  such  a  theme  clearly  home  to  the 
audience.  Yet  this  is  just  what  every  thoughtful 
landscape  gardener  is  trying  to  do. 

The  history  motive :  Any  one  who  visits  the  na- 
tional reservation  at  Lookout  Mountain  must  find 
the  views  very  impressive.  But  unless  he  is  wholly 
innocent  of  imagination  he  will  be  promptly  drawn 
away  from  the  glories  of  Moccasin  Bend  by  the 
historic  associations.  The  place  is  saturated  with 
them.  Relics,  tablets  and  monuments  are  com- 
moner than  trees.  They  are  easily  accepted  as  the 
dominating  subject  matter — the  leading  motive. 

The  Shakespeare  motive:  In  a  London  park  I 
once  visited  a  little  enclosed  garden  said  to  contain 
every  kind  of  flower  and  shrub  mentioned  in  the 


71 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

works  of  Shakespeare.  It  was  a  curious  place — I 
am  sure  some  persons  found  it  interesting.  To 
me  it  stands  as  a  first-class  illustration  of  the  liter- 
ary or  extrinsic  or  accidental  motive.  This  is  cer- 
tainly not  the  highest  type  of  landscape  motive, 
but  it  is  perfectly  legitimate,  nevertheless. 

Possibly  it  may  make  this  important  matter  of 
motives  clearer  to  summarize  what  has  been  said  by 
a  rough  sort  of  classification.  It  is  clear  that  the 
more  usual  landscape  motives  fall  into  the  follow- 
ing groups: 

1.  Topographic  motives,  such  as  prairie,  moun- 
tains, rivers,  lakes. 

2.  Tree  motives,  belonging  primarily  to  those 
natural  landscapes  which  are  dominated  by  some 
single  species.     This  motive  species  is  usually  as- 
sociated with  other  secondary  species,  which  then 
become  integral  to  the  theme. 

3.  Garden  flower  motives,  such  as  sunflower,  the 
hollyhock,  and  hundreds  more,  suited  for  use  chiefly 
in  small  gardens. 

4.  Historic,  literary  and  other  extraneous  mo- 
tives. 


72 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

The  manner  in  which  these  motives  are  developed 
in  landscape  composition  will  be  discussed  more 
fully  in  the  next  chapter. 


PRINCIPLES    OF    STRUCTURAL    COM- 
POSITION 

THOSE  who  have  not  considered  the  matter 
are  apt  to  think  that  a  garden  in  the  natural 
style  has  no  structure,  that  it  is  a  merely  ac- 
cidental succession  of  parts.  This  notion  is  wrong, 
of  course.  The  home  garden,  public  park  or  forest 
reserve  intelligently  designed  in  the  natural  style 
has  just  as  definite  and  logical  a  plan  as  the  best 
geometrical  garden.  Its  structure  follows  laws 
just  as  plain  and  necessary.  There  are,  to  be  sure, 
a  great  many  gardens  to  be  found  in  an  alleged  nat- 
ural style  which  truly  have  neither  rhyme  nor  rea- 
son. They  have  no  plan  nor  structure.  They  were 
not  designed.  They  just  grew,  like  Topsy.  No — 
that's  assigning  them  too  much  credit,  for  a  garden 
which  grows  up  honestly  round  the  family  life  of 
owners,  or  a  park  that  grows  up  decently  in  the 
hands  of  a  devoted  superintendent,  often  shows  a 
genuine  form  and  structure  given  to  it  by  the  natu- 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

ral  forces  of  growth.  The  mere  fact  that  there  are 
some  "natural"  gardens  without  form  and  void 
cannot  stand  against  the  structural  possibilities  of 
this  style.  There  are  also  a  great  many  geometri- 
cal gardens  in  which  the  structure  is  merely  fortu- 
itous or  wholly  inarticulate. 

The  first  structural  problem  in  designing  in  the 
natural  style  comes  with  the  division  of  the  ground 
into  various  compartments.  If  we  are  dealing  with 
a  park  of  any  size,  there  will  be  perhaps  a  piece 
of  woodland  here,  beyond  it  an  open  field  to  be  de- 
voted to  golf,  on  the  other  side  a  section  for  a  picnic 
ground,  then  a  little  children's  playground,  and 
finally  an  area  for  public  music  and  festivity. 
These  divisions  will  follow  the  natural  features  of 
the  topography  and  the  social  demands  of  the  situ- 
ation, but  they  are  to  be  made  with  great  care. 
Frederick  Law  Olmsted  used  to  give  particular 
thought  to  this  part  of  his  study  and  it  is  very  in- 
teresting to  go  over  the  plans  of  Mount  Royal 
Park,  Montreal,  Franklin  Park,  Boston,  or  Jack- 
son Park,  Chicago,  for  examples,  to  see  how  these 
divisions  were  made  and  what  clever  names  he  in- 


75 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

vented  for  them.  This  naming  of  the  parts,  e.  g., 
"The  Upper  Fells,"  "The  Greeting,"  "The 
Wooded  Island"  is  significant,  for  it  indicates  that 
to  each  of  these  parts  the  artist  wished  to  give  a 
character  of  its  own.  This  little  trick  was  peculiar 
to  Olmsted  and  has  not  even  been  well  imitated  by 
anybody  since  his  day. 

Even  in  the  small  private  garden,  the  same 
method  of  subdivision  has  to  be  followed  to  some 
extent.  The  massing  of  wild  flowers  should  be  ap- 
pointed to  one  section,  the  open  lawn  with  its  cro- 
quet ground  should  have  its  own  allotment,  the  big 
shade  trees  belong  in  another  quarter  and  the  ever- 
greens still  elsewhere.  It  may  not  be  possible  to 
develop  these  several  characters  so  completely  as  in 
the  larger  spaces  of  a  big  park,  but  the  essential 
structure  is  there  just  the  same.  A  coffee  mill  is 
not  so  big  as  a  turbine  steamship,  but  it  has  its  own 
parts  and  structure  quite  as  truly. 

It  is  not  to  be  understood  that  these  parts  in  a 
natural  park  or  garden  are  to  be  separated  from 
each  other  by  distinct  lines  in  any  case.  If  they  are 
set  apart  by  high  walls,  then  we  have  several  gar- 


76 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

dens  instead  of  one,  and  each  of  these  gardens  has 
its  own  organization.  The  happy  blending  of  these 
several  compartments  along  their  lines  of  juncture, 
while  preserving  their  essential  character  within,  is 
a  part  of  the  landscape  gardener's  art.  So  far  as 
this  art  has  any  technic,  it  follows  the  rules  dis- 
cussed elsewhere  for  the  blending  of  groups  in 
planting. 

In  very  large  parks,  however,  the  various  sec- 
tions, or  certain  of  them,  may  become  so  large  as 
to  require  treatment  like  separate  parks.  A  big 
state  park  of  fifty  square  miles,  for  example,  might 
have  a  public  camp  ground  along  the  lake  shore,  a 
forest  reserve  on  the  mountain  sides,  and  a  fair 
grounds  at  one  corner.  These  three  enterprises 
would  present  practically  three  problems  and  would 
call  for  three  park  designs.  Every  work  of  art 
must  fall  into  commensurable  limits,  that  is  within 
such  range  that  one  man  at  one  time  and  place  can 
comprehend  and  enjoy  the  whole.  When  it  re- 
quires three  days  to  perform  one  musical  composi- 
tion it  ceases  to  be  a  work  of  art  and  becomes  a  gen- 
eral exhibition. 


77 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

We  have  in  hand  now  our  tract  of  land  with  all 
its  natural  features,  we  understand  all  the  require- 
ments of  our  problem,  we  have  determined  on  the 
plan  of  subdivision,  and  we  are  ready  to  attack  the 
design.  We  may  suppose  also  that  we  have  adopted 
a  theme  or  leading  motive,  such  as  has  been  dis- 
cussed in  Chapter  IV.  The  next  problem  in  struc- 
tural technic  is  to  effect  an  entrance. 

The  main  entrance  to  a  park  or  garden  is  fre- 
quently fixed  by  the  conditions  of  the  problem. 
In  such  cases  it  is  usually  possible  to  accept  the 
situation  without  discussion,  though  occasionally  a 
proposed  entrance  is  so  unfortunate  as  to  justify 
heroic  efforts  for  its  displacement.  If  the  designer 
has  some  freedom  of  choice  he  will  give  this  ques- 
tion very  special  attention,  for  a  good  introduction 
is  half  the  story.  The  orator  spares  no  pains  with 
his  exordium  to  ingratiate  himself  with  his  audi- 
ence. The  composer  of  music  arranges  a  carefully 
studied  introduction  for  every  set  piece.  The  ar- 
chitect always  wishes  to  have  the  portal  and  en- 
trance hall  of  every  building  as  attractive  as  pos- 
sible. 


78 


NEW    ENGLAND     COUNTRY    ROAD 


GOING     FISHING.          THE     COUNTRY    ROAI) 

Photographs  by  the  Author 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

In  general,  the  entrance  to  the  park  will  be  at 
some  distance  from  the  culminating  feature,  if  not 
indeed  at  the  farthest  remove  from  it.  If  contrari- 
wise, one  should  make  his  entrance  directly  upon 
the  main  show,  or  immediately  facing  the  grand 
view,  the  rest  of  the  visit  to  the  park  might  better 
be  abandoned,  for  it  will  be  a  depressing  down 
grade  run  to  an  anticlimax.  For  this  reason  it  is 
quite  possible,  in  the  anxiety  to  make  a  good  first 
impression,  to  overdo  the  treatment  of  the  park  en- 
trance. I  could  name  more  than  one  park  in  Amer- 
ica in  which  one  sees  nothing  further  to  compare 
with  the  blaze  of  ornament  which  greets  him  at  the 
front  gate. 

I  hesitate  to  lay  it  down  as  a  general  rule,  but  I 
have  a  strong  feeling  that  it  is  good  technic  to 
place  the  entrance  somewhere  near  the  lowest  level 
of  the  park.  By  this  expedient,  the  visitor  will  see 
most  of  the  scenery  as  he  drives  the  road  on  an  up 
grade.  Photographers  and  painters  know  that  the 
picturesque  compositions  which  gather  along  a 
roadway  are  usually  seen  to  best  advantage  when 
viewed  toward  the  rising  grade.  In  the  strongest 

79 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

pictures  the  road  curves  upward,  and  a  composition 
in  which  it  takes  a  downward  course  is  almost  al- 
ways pictorially  weak.  The  visitor,  too,  on  the  up 
grade  will  drive  more  slowly  and  have  more  time 
to  enjoy  the  view.  Then  when  he  has  reached  the 
climax  somewhere  near  the  top  he  can  quickly  find 
his  way  down  hill  to  a  convenient  exit. 

I  think  there  is  a  psychological  reason  also  for 
the  rule  here  suggested.  There  is  a  feeling  of  ex- 
hilaration and  a  satisfaction  of  achievement  as  one 
climbs  the  hill  which  is  quite  absent  from  the  down 
trip.  Mountain  climbers  always  get  their  pay  go- 
ing up.  The  views  coming  down  are  only  remi- 
niscences. 

It  is  good  technic  to  present  the  main  theme,  or 
at  least  to  suggest  it,  in  the  introduction.  The 
musical  composer  does  this.  The  architect  would 
consider  his  entrance  badly  designed  if  one  could 
not  tell  from  it  whether  he  was  entering  a  church 
or  a  military  barracks.  If  the  pine  woods  are  to  be 
the  main  theme  in  a  park,  it  would  be  quite  proper 
to  introduce  a  few  pines  at  the  park  entrance.  Cer- 
tainly a  rose-garden  would  be  artistically  unsuit- 


80 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

able  for  the  entrance  to  such  a  park.  If  we  are 
planning  a  riverside  park,  we  ought  to  have  a 
glimpse  of  the  river  from  the  entrance,  or  at  least 
some  planting  or  some  sculptured  setting  to  suggest 
the  flowing  water.  If  we  are  designing  a  cemetery 
park  the  quiet  and  solemn  character  of  the  place 
should  be  plainly  signified  at  the  entrance.  I  know 
a  certain  woodland  cemetery  which  has  a  truly  gor- 
geous bed  of  cannas  and  coleus  at  the  entrance,  fit 
for  Monte  Carlo  or  Coney  Island. 

From  the  entrance  forward  the  natural  park  is 
developed  in  a  sort  of  panorama.  The  visitor  is 
led  from  point  to  point,  where  he  sees  picture  after 
picture,  some  of  pleasing  foregrounds  filled  with 
flowers,  some  of  quiet  masses  of  trees  in  middle 
ground,  and  some  inspiring  outlooks  to  distant 
landscapes.  These  points  are  connected  by  a  suit- 
able path  or  roadway  which  forms  the  true  back- 
bone of  the  garden  structure. 

These  successive  pictures,  however,  should  bear 
a  very  definite  relationship  to  one  another.  First 
of  all,  each  one  should  present  the  leading  motive 
in  some  phase  of  its  development.  If  we  are  using 

81 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

the  river  motive  then  the  river  should  be  visible  or 
distinctly  suggested  in  each  fully  developed  picture. 

Furthermore,  these  successive  pictures  will  occur 
at  definite  points  or  paragraphs.  Each  section  of 
our  drive  or  walk  or  trail  will  be  designed  to  de- 
velop some  particular  phase  of  the  leading  motive. 
Each  paragraph  then  will  have  its  point  of  culmi- 
nation, beyond  which  we  pass  rapidly  to  the  next 
paragraph. 

These  culminating  points,  paragraphic  points, 
or  nodes,  will  be  given  further  emphasis  by  spe- 
cial structural  methods,  particularly  by  giving  to 
our  drive  or  walk  at  these  points  its  principal 
change  of  direction  and  its  principal  change  of 
grade.  It  follows  naturally  that  any  other  fea- 
tures of  emphasis,  such  as  seats,  shelters  or  special 
ornamental  structures  should  be  placed  at  para- 
graphic points.  If  definite  exterior  or  interior 
views  are  to  be  emphasized,  they,  too,  should  be  pre- 
sented from  these  nodes  or  paragraphic  points. 

To  summarize:  Each  paragraph  will  proceed 
from  its  introduction  to  its  culmination  consistently 
developing  some  phase  of  the  leading  motive.  At 


82 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

the  paragraphic  period  we  would  usually  find  the 
following  features: 

1.  The  clearest  expression  of  the  paragraphic 
episode — the  culmination  of  the  particular  phase 
of  the  leading  motive  here  under  development. 

2.  The  principal  change  in  horizontal  direction 
of  the  roadway. 

3.  The  principal  change  of  grade. 

4.  The  principal  features  of  architectural  or  or- 
namental emphasis. 

5.  The  principal  change  in  plantings. 

As  an  illustration  we  may  suppose  that  the  first 
section  of  our  afternoon  drive  takes  us  on  a  long 
sweep  to  the  westward  with  the  warm  sun  in  our 
faces  and  the  wind  at  the  left.  We  are  jogging 
comfortably  along  on  a  practically  level  road,  but 
with  an  up  grade  varying  from  nothing  to  two  per 
cent.  We  are  passing  across  a  level  meadow  land 
spangled  with  buttercups  and  daisies.  Here  and 
there  at  wide  intervals  stand  fine  specimens  of  white 
oak,  representative  of  the  deciduous  forest,  the  lead- 
ing motive  of  our  composition  and  the  subject  of 
our  afternoon's  enjoyment.  In  front  of  us  we  see 


83 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

the  heavier  masses  of  the  woods  scattered  over  roll- 
ing hills  and  making  a  bold  but  fluent  sky  line 
against  the  three  o'clock  sun.  A  bobolink  sings  us 
a  snatch  of  Robert  of  Lincoln: 

Spink,  spank,  spink, 
Chee,  chee,  chee! 

awakening  the  music  in  our  hearts,  as  the  sun  has 
already  melted  the  reserve  of  our  city  manners  and 
we  know  that  we  are  in  the  country  and  the  wor- 
ries of  the  morning's  business  are  already  half  for- 
gotten. 

Presently  we  reach  the  foot  of  the  hill  land.  The 
roadway  turns  rather  sharply  to  the  right  to  avoid 
the  climb,  but  nevertheless  the  gradient  is  percep- 
tibly increased,  varying  from  two  to  four  per  cent. 
Dobbin  slows  down  to  a  walk  and  we  pass  to  para- 
graph number  two.  Here  the  white  oaks  are  still 
scattered  rather  than  massed  (white  oaks  do  not 
like  to  be  too  sociable;  they  prefer  to  keep  their 
individuality) ;  but  they  are  close  enough  together 
to  suggest  the  forest.  As  we  rise  we  still  get  occa- 
sional glimpses  of  the  meadow,  but  our  main  in- 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

terest  here  is  in  the  trees  with  occasional  outcrop- 
pings  of  interesting  rocks  partly  covered  with  trail- 
ing masses  of  sweet  briers,  and  the  striking  outline 
of  the  hill  to  the  north  of  us  which  now  faces  us 
since  we  turned. 


And  so  we  pass  from  paragraph  to  paragraph. 
Perhaps  number  three  brings  us  to  a  hill  top  and 
gives  us  a  view  of  the  woodland  about  us ;  perhaps 
number  four  descends  into  a  wooded  ravine,  where 
oak  forest  passes  gradually  into  maple  or  beech; 
perhaps  number  five  skirts  the  bank  of  a  lake,  giv- 


85 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

ing  us  an  opportunity  to  see  the  magnificent  forms 
of  the  trees  on  the  opposite  shore,  with  their  in- 
verted images  rippling  toward  us  over  the  water. 
Such  is  the  paragraphic  structure  of  the  natural 
park. 

The  same  method  is  applicable  to  all  kinds  of  in- 
formal composition.  If  the  problem  is  a  simple 
border  of  mixed  perennials  along  a  garden  wall, 
we  can  adopt  a  leading  motive  and  a  paragraphic 
treatment.  Or  if  we  are  only  trying  to  improve  a 
skyline  we  will  divide  it  into  paragraphs,  giving 
each  section  its  own  treatment,  its  climax  and  its 
blend  into  the  next  section. 

It  is  easy  to  show,  of  course,  that  this  method  is 
practically  universal  in  art.  Precisely  the  same 
terms  may  be  used  to  describe  the  structure  of  an 
oration,  a  drama,  or  a  good  editorial  in  the  Spring- 
field Republican.  Each  has  its  theme,  its  succes- 
sive paragraphs,  its  periods,  its  climaxes  and  its  con- 
clusion. Every  musical  composition  has  its  theme, 
it  is  divided  into  several  movements,  it  is  para- 
graphed into  strains,  usually  of  sixteen  measures 
each,  the  strains  are  subdivided  into  bars,  and  each 


86 


XATURAI.ISTIC    COMPOSITION.      BACK   YARD   GARDEN 

Design  by  Mr.  Jens  Jensen 
Photograph  by  Henry  Fuermann  $  Sons 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

bar  may  have  two,  three,  four  or  six  beats.  This 
gives  us  our  musical  rhythm;  but  rhythm  has  its 
uses  in  other  branches  of  art  besides  music.  I  have 
often  found  it  most  convenient  to  speak  of  the 
rhythm  of  a  garden  composition.  A  row  of  trees 
has  just  the  same  succession  of  accents  which  we 
find  in  the  measures  of  martial  music.  Rhythm  is 
merely  a  certain  kind  of  paragraphic  structure.  It 
is  easy  to  see  the  same  rhythmic  or  paragraphic  dis- 
position of  parts,  in  ornamentation  or  total  compo- 
sition, in  architecture ;  it  can  be  found  also  in  paint- 
ing, especially  in  decorative  painting,  while  any 
ensemble  of  sculpture  necessarily  follows  the  same 
plan  of  grouping. 

The  comparison  of  landscape  gardening  with  mu- 
sic is  always  suggestive,  and  this  comparison  de- 
serves to  be  followed  out  a  little  further  just  at  this 
point.  The  composer  of  music,  as  will  be  easily  dis- 
covered, builds  up  his  compositions  upon  his  se- 
lected motives  in  divers  ways.  The  simplest  song 
theme  stands  alone.  The  airs  of  ballads  and  folk 
songs,  and  even  of  dance  tunes  are  always  first  used 
in  this  manner. 


87 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

Later  follows  part  singing,  with  two  or  three  or 
four  voices,  in  duet,  trio  or  quartet.  These  several 
parts  are  harmonized.  One  voice,  usually  the  so- 
prano, "carries  the  air,"  that  is  the  theme,  while  the 
others  support  it  with  harmonizing  notes.  This 
method  of  composition  is  frequently  followed  by 
the  landscape  architect. 

In  his  more  complex  works,  as  in  advanced  sym- 
phony, he  uses  two  motives  together — sometimes 
three  or  four.  These  are  woven  through  and 
through  one  another  and  into  the  texture  of  his 
symphonic  fabric  by  the  method  which  he  calls 
counterpoint.  Sometimes  motives  follow  one  an- 
other or  are  contrasted  against  each  other  without 
being  counterpointed.  This  contrapuntal  method 
of  composition  is  always  open  to  the  landscape  de- 
signer; and  if  it  has  been  seldom  adopted  the  diffi- 
culty of  the  problem  will  sufficiently  explain  that 
fact. 

We  may  as  well  admit  just  here  that  this  theory 
of  paragraphs  and  motives  does  not  make  plain  the 
whole  of  art.  Neither  does  it  offer  a  short  cut  to 
success  in  landscape  architecture.  We  are  not 

88 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

offering  to  teach  the  sum  of  garden  art  in  one  les- 
son. The  paragraphic  art  has  been  known  in  litera- 
ture almost  since  literature  began,  yet  there  are 
only  a  few  writers  who  give  a  sound  paragraphic 
structure  to  their  work.  There  are  still  many  es- 
says, editorials  and  sermons  which  start  nowhere 
and  without  any  recognizable  theme,  run  a  level 
uneventful  course  to  the  same  point.  Unfortu- 
nately a  considerable  part  of  our  naturalistic  land- 
scape gardening  is  of  this  sort.  A  man  must  have 
something  to  say  and  some  way  of  saying  it  before 
he  can  preach  a  real  sermon.  A  landscape  architect 
must  have  a  genuine  inspiration  and  must  then  be 
possessed  of  an  effective  technic  before  he  can  make 
a  landscape  which  has  theme  and  structure,  char- 
acter and  clothes,  spirit  and  body.  The  para- 
graphic method  belongs  only  to  technic  and  even 
here  indicates  merely  the  fundamental  principle. 
Its  application  still  requires  artistic  skill  and  the 
skill  of  the  artist  comes  only  through  years  of  de- 
voted practice. 

In  as  much  as  these  structural  principles  of  in- 
formal composition  have  been  widely  overlooked, 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

and  as  it  is  important  that  they  should  be  distinctly 
understood  it  may  be  worth  while  to  summarize  the 
entire  case  here. 

SUMMARY 

1.  Every  informal  park  or  garden  should  be  par- 
tially or  wholly  enclosed  in  order  to  give  it  a  feeling 
of  unity  and  sometimes  of  privacy, — but  this  en- 
closure need  not  be  so  obvious  nor  so  complete  as 
in  the  formal  garden.     Good  outlooks  should  be 
especially  preserved.    The  enclosure  will  be  com- 
posed chiefly  of  borders  of  trees  and  shrubs.     In 
very  large  parks  no  general  enclosure  will  be  at- 
tempted, but  special  areas  may  be  more  or  less  seg- 
regated for  special  purposes. 

2.  The  main  structural  features  will  usually  be 
roads,  paths,  or  navigable  waters ;  and  the  principal 
one  of  these  lines  will,  as  nearly  as  practicable,  cir- 
cumscribe the  area  under  treatment.     In  certain 
cases  it  will  become  a  linear  vertebral  support,  as, 
for  example,  in  a  long  river-way  or  park-way. 

3.  The    principal    considerations    in    locating 
drives,  walks,  etc.,  will  be  (a)  the  shape  of  the  area, 


90 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

(b)  topography,  (c)  convenience  of  travel  between 
important  points,  (d)  development  of  views. 

4.  To  secure  unity  of  artistic  effect  a  suitable 
motive  or  theme  should  be  selected  and  should  be 
adhered  to  as  closely  as  possible.    Under  no  circum- 
stances should  effects  at  variance  with  the  leading 
motive  be  introduced. 

5.  The  successive  episodes  in  the  development  of 
this  motive  will  appear  at  well  marked  points, 
which  points  will  all  be  upon  the  main  structural 
roads  or  paths,  thus  developing  the  theme  in  a 
paragraphic  manner. 

6.  The    principal    landscape    effects    will    be 
brought  together  at  these  paragraphic  points  or 
nodes.    At  these  points  will  occur  (a)  the  principal 
changes  in  direction  of  roads  or  paths  (b)  principal 
change  or  grade,  (c)  change  of  planting,  (d)  prin- 
cipal interior  or  exterior  views,  (e)  but  especially 
the  culmination  of  the  motive  episode. 

7.  It  is  desirable  to  avoid  the  use  of  straight 
lines  and  radial  curves, — but  awkward  and  unnat- 
ural  curved   or   crooked   lines   must   be   equally 
avoided. 


91 


THE  ART  OF  GROUPING 

LANDSCAPE  gardeners,  especially  those 
of  the  naturalistic  persuasion,  have  always 
had  a  suspicion  that  the  art  of  grouping 
their  plants  was  a  very  important  matter.  At  one 
time  and  another  a  good  deal  of  discussion  has  been 
given  to  the  subject,  a  large  part  of  it  fruitless. 
Indeed  the  net  result,  after  years  of  landscape  gar- 
dening, seems  very  slight.  The  best  men  still  ap- 
pear to  have  vague  and  hazy  ideas  on  the  subject. 
Old  practitioners  have  indeed  fallen  into  working 
formulas  of  their  own,  but  they  themselves  usually 
feel  that  these  formulas  are  inadequate,  while 
every  one  else  can  see  that  these  set  methods  of 
grouping  are  more  detrimental  than  useful.  It  is 
perhaps  too  much  to  expect  that,  under  these  cir- 
cumstances, the  whole  art  of  plant  grouping  can 
now  be  set  forth  simply  and  eff ectively  in  a  book. 
Yet  a  careful  discussion  of  the  main  points  must 
prove  helpful,  and  the  endeavor  to  reach  a  state- 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

ment  of  principles  wp  at  least  be  suggestive. 

It  seems  possible  to  distinguish  seven  different 
types  of  plant  groups  classified  as  to  form.  These 
are  (1)  the  single  specimen,  (2)  the  group  of  two, 
(3)  the  group  of  three,  (4)  the  larger  group  of 
five  or  more,  (5)  the  row,  (6)  the  mass,  (7)  the 
social  group. 

The  single  specimen  is,  strictly  speaking,  not  a 
group,  of  course,  but  it  demands  treatment  in  this 
same  connection.  Early  landscape  gardening  dealt 
largely  in  specimens.  Writers  often  emphasized 
the  importance  of  giving  each  individual  room  for 
complete  development.  Many  of  the  old  time  gar- 
dens were  nothing  more  than  collections  of  indi- 
vidual specimens.  This  tendency  toward  specimen 
planting  has  not  wholly  disappeared.  In  botanic 
gardens  it  is  appropriate  and  necessary.  But  in 
pure  landscape  gardening,  where  the  idea  of  pic- 
torial composition  prevails,  the  specimen  method 
must  be  curbed.  The  single  fully  developed  tree, 
standing  by  itself,  is  an  abnormality  and  a  rarity 
in  nature.  It  is,  however,  a  rarity  which  is  very 
pleasing  to  the  human  eye,  and  the  landscape  gar- 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

dener  may  well  introduce  this  unit  with  consider- 
ably greater  frequency  than  nature  does. 

However,  in  any  pictorial  composition,  specimens 
must  be  introduced  with  great  restraint.  It  may  be 
considered  false  composition  to  make  more  than  one 
specimen  visible  in  any  one  view.  Perhaps  it  will 
be  safe  to  say  that  any  first-class  specimen  should 
be  so  placed  as  to  form  the  culmination  of  a  para- 
graph. Certainly  if  an  individual  tree  is  worth 
keeping  as  a  specimen  it  must  be  worthy  of  con- 
siderable emphasis,  an  emphasis  which  it  could  pos- 
sibly have  at  no  other  point  in  the  composition. 

The  group  of  two  seems  to  be  habitually  avoided 
by  landscape  gardeners.  Yet  I  am  convinced  that 
this  is  due  to  an  unfounded  prejudice.  In  many 
years  of  sketching  and  photographing,  seeking 
about  for  attractive  compositions,  I  have  repeatedly 
been  drawn  to  admire  two  trees  of  a  species  stand- 
ing faithfully  together  in  the  pasture,  in  the  fence 
row  or  on  the  hillside.  Indeed  I  can  hardly  think 
of  any  other  unit  which  has  so  often  attracted  my 
pencil  or  my  camera.  Every  one,  I  suppose,  has  a 
somewhat  human  feeling  about  trees,  as  though 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

they  possessed  personalities  like  our  own;  and  cer- 
tainly two  persons  of  like  character  always  stand 
well  together.  It  is  the  human  feeling  that  "two 
is  company,  three  is  a  crowd."  I  am  sure  that  the 
works  of  the  painters  and  artist  photographers  will 
show  that  two  trees  properly  related  have  great  pic- 
torial value,  and  this  type  of  grouping  ought  to  be 
more  frequently  used  by  landscape  planters. 

The  group  of  three,  on  the  other  hand,  seems  to 
have  a  special  fascination  for  the  landscape  gar- 
dener, like  a  bright  light  for  wild  animals.  Look 
over  the  planting  plans  and  planting  lists  in  any 
office,  and  how  many  hundreds  of  groups  of  three 
shall  you  find!  The  funny  song  about  "The  Three 
Trees"  might  have  been  made  for  their  particular 
use.  There  are  literally  thousands  of  entries  such 
as  "3  Red  Maple,"  "3  Tupelo,"  "3  Honey  Locust," 
"3  Lilacs"  or  even  "3  Hydrangea  p.g." 

This  is,  I  suspect,  a  psychological  phenomenon, 
but  we  need  not  stop  now  for  psychological  expla- 
nations. We  can  be  sure,  I  believe,  without  such  in- 
vestigations, that  the  group  of  three  has  no  such 
pictorial  value  as  its  strangely  frequent  use  would 


95 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

imply.  Indeed  in  purely  pictorial  effect  I  think 
two  trees  are  usually  better  than  three.  And  I  will 
add  one  further  suspicion,  viz.,  that  when  three 
trees  or  shrubs  compose  a  group  it  is  usually  better 
to  place  them  in  an  irregular  row  than  in  an  equi- 
lateral triangle,  though  the  amateur  planter  has  a 
strong  tendency  toward  the  latter  figure. 

The  group  of  three  ought  to  be  used  and  used 
with  considerable  freedom,  but  it  must  not  be  con- 
ventionalized. There  can  be  no  doubt  about  its 
being  too  often  employed.  Nature  herself  does  not 
hold  the  number  sacred.  She  does  not  choose  three 
trees  for  a  group  any  oftener  than  two  or  four. 

The  four-tree  group  is  practically  unknown  in 
artificial  planting.  Of  course  there  is  nothing  in 
nature  against  this  unit;  but  the  landscape  gar- 
dener seems  to  feel  that  four  trees  of  a  kind  are 
just  enough  to  lose  their  individuality  without  gain- 
ing the  proper  effect  of  the  mass. 

Five  trees  or  shrubs,  however,  always  appeal  to 
the  thought  of  the  man  who  makes  planting  plans 
on  a  drawing  board.  The  fact  that  some  nursery 
catalogues  quote  stock  by  fives  and  tens  also  has  its 


A    XATURAL    GROUPING    OF    TREES 

Photograph  by  the  Author 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

psychological  effect.  The  feeling  for  odd  numbers 
also  throws  its  emphasis  on  the  five.  With  any- 
where from  five  to  twelve,  according  to  species,  we 
have  individuals  enough  to  make  a  genuine  and 
effective  group.  At  this  stage  grouping  comes  to 
its  real  meaning;  and  it  must  be  allowed  that  most 
planters  are  more  successful  in  groups  of  this  size 
than  in  any  other  scale.  Perhaps  this  is  the  same 
as  to  say  that  in  common  garden  and  park  problems 
this  unit  gives  the  most  advantageous  effect. 

Another  good  reason,  however,  for  the  success  of 
these  larger  groups  lies  in  the  fact  that  they  offer 
much  wider  possibilities  in  detailed  composition. 
There  is  much  less  danger  of  falling  into  one  stiff, 
set  grouping. 

Since  groups  of  this  moderate  size  have  such  spe- 
cial value  in  landscape  composition  we  may  prop- 
erly dwell  somewhat  longer  on  the  problems  con- 
nected with  their  development. 

Thus  far  we  have  assumed  that  each  group  is  to 
be  composed  of  plants  all  alike — all  of  the  same 
species  and  variety.  In  groups  of  less  than  five, 
this  is  almost  obligatory,  but  in  larger  units  there 


97 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

is  no  such  necessity.  While  there  is  no  limit  to  the 
number  of  plants  which  may  reasonably  be  used  in 
a  pure  group,  there  should  be  no  prejudice  against 
the  mixed  group.  The  mixed  group  has  abundant 
prototypes  in  nature.  When  properly  composed  it 
is  wholly  agreeable  to  the  eye. 

A  few  very  simple  rules  may  be  given  for  making 
up  groups  of  this  kind.  The  following  suggestions 
seem  safe. 

1.  Do  not  use  too  many  species.    Two  or  three 
are  usually  more  effective  than  more  would  be. 
(The  law  of  simplicity.) 

2.  One  species  should  dominate  the  group,  the 
others  being  obviously  subordinate.     (The  law  of 
dominance. ) 

3.  The   species   must   harmonize,   especially   in 
color,  form  and  habit  of  growth.     ( The  law  of  har- 
mony.) 

4.  They  must  be  socially  compatible.     (The  law 
of  ecology.) 

5.  They  must  all  be  adapted  to  the  local  condi- 
tions of  soil,  drainage,  light,  etc.      (The  law  of 
adaptation.) 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

The  row  of  trees  is  commonly  excluded  from  all 
naturalistic  planting,  or  is  admitted  only  under 
protest.  The  row  is  obviously  artificial  and  so  con- 
tradicts flatly  the  feeling  which  the  landscape  gar- 
dener is  often  trying  to  establish,  i.  e.,  the  feeling 
that  here  nature  has  had  her  own  way.  It  is  quite 
plain  that  the  tree  row  is  outside  the  forms  of  nature 
and  may  even  break  seriously  upon  the  spirit  of 
naturalistic  work. 

All  this  may  be  granted,  and  yet  the  tree  row  not 
wholly  abolished.  There  are  many  places  where  the 
natural  style  may  be  appropriately  adopted  yet 
where  the  illusion  of  the  uninhabited  wilderness  can 
never  be  attained.  Large  and  obvious  compromises 
with  civilization  may  be  made  without  vitiating  en- 
tirely the  naturalistic  method.  Straight  streets  and 
long  architectural  lines  are  common  elements  in  our 
practical  landscape  problems;  and  they  are  ele- 
ments to  be  met  frankly  and  honestly.  Along  such 
lines  the  formal  row  of  trees  always  has  charm, 
dignity,  beauty.  It  is  by  no  means  always  neces- 
sary, therefore,  to  exclude  such  objects  of  charm, 
dignity  and  beauty  from  every  composition  on  the 


99 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

ground  of  their  essential  unnaturalness,  especially 
after  the  compromise  has  already  been  forced  from 
another  quarter. 

What  is  true  of  the  formal  tree  row  will  be  even 
more  readily  admitted  in  the  matter  of  the  informal 
row.  In  all  the  regions  of  the  Old  World  where 
men  have  lived  long  and  numerously,  and  in  those 
parts  of  America  which  have  approached  the  same 
conditions,  we  find  the  informal  irregular  tree  row 
a  very  common  unit  in  the  landscape.  Such  ragged 
rows  represent  the  borders  of  old  fields,  old  fence 
lines,  the  position  of  lost  roads  or  of  property  di- 
visions. As  a  rule  they  are  picturesque  and  pleas- 
ing— often  extremely  so.  Look  on  the  paintings  in 
the  art  gallery  and  see  how  frequently  their  beauty 
has  moved  the  artist's  brush.  It  would  be  folly  to 
reject  from  our  landscape  gardening  a  unit  of  such 
approved  power.  We  are  not  even  justified  in  ex- 
cluding it  from  the  natural  style,  for  indeed  these 
picturesque  tree  borders  do  not  fit  any  better,  nor 
half  so  well,  into  any  formal  gardening. 

If  we  are  able  to  adopt — as  we  surely  shall  be 
within  the  next  century — the  agricultural  land- 


100 


ROW    OF    THEES    ALOXG    THE    PASTURE    FENCE 

Photograph  by  the  Author 


OLD    APPLE    ORCHARD 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

scape  more  fully  into  our  feeling  for  nature  we 
shall  be  less  sensitive  about  the  unnaturalness  of 
these  informal  rows  of  trees  and  shrubbery.  The 
agricultural  landscape  is  in  reality  one  of  the  great 
topographical  types,  and  one  which  we  must  learn 
to  appreciate  more  highly. 

Mass  planting  is  a  comparatively  new  discovery 
in  landscape  gardening  and  marks  one  of  the  great- 
est advances  yet  made  toward  a  genuinely  natural- 
istic style.  The  use  of  trees  by  the  thousands  for 
screens  or  backgrounds,  the  introduction  of  rhodo- 
dendrons by  carloads  for  underplanting,  the  devel- 
opment of  considerable  forest  tracts  as  elements  in 
pictorial  landscape  treatment,  these  are  all  good 
examples  of  mass  planting.  We  may  have  mass 
effects  on  a  much  smaller  scale  than  this,  however. 
Without  splitting  hairs  we  may  define  a  mass  as  a 
group  of  such  extent  that  its  limits  are  not  all  vis- 
ible from  some  chosen  point  of  view. 

Mass  plantings  are  of  two  kinds,  pure  and 
mixed.  Pure  masses  are  composed  of  a  single  spe- 
cies or  variety,  mixed  masses  of  several.  The  usual 
continuous  border  planting  follows  the  mass  struc- 


101 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

ture. 

The  social  group  will  usually  be  a  mass  planting, 
though  some  of  the  large  groups,  containing  a  dozen 
or  more  individuals,  may  be  constructed  on  the 
social  principle.  This  social  or  ecological  principle 
is  discussed  at  greater  length  elsewhere  (see  page 
51)  so  that  for  the  present  we  need  only  call 
attention  to  it  as  one  of  the  methods  of  group  com- 
position. 

Having  now  considered  the  various  types  of 
groups  from  the  structural  standpoint  it  is  impor- 
tant to  discuss  the  relation  of  the  group  to  the 
larger  elements  of  landscape  structure  and  to  other 
principles  of  composition. 

It  must  be  pointed  out  first  of  all  that  these  vari- 
ous groups  are  all  perfectly  natural  forms.  Nature 
uses  all  these  groupings.  It  is  possible,  as  all  of  us 
sadly  realize,  to  construct  any  of  these  groupings  in 
a  very  unnatural  and  artificial  manner;  but  it  is 
possible  also,  no  matter  how  difficult  it  may  be,  to 
present  them  in  a  perfectly  naturalistic  and  agree- 
able character.  In  fact,  the  grouping  of  plants  is 
one  of  the  first  principles  in  nature's  own  methods 


102 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

of  distribution.  In  a  word,  good  grouping  is  abso- 
lutely essential  to  the  natural  style. 

Considering  the  group  with  reference  to  total 
structure  we  shall  see  that  the  unit  group  in  the 
smaller  works  may  constitute  the  entire  paragraph. 
In  other  words,  to  develop  a  small  garden  in  good 
paragraphic  structure  it  may  prove  best  to  use  only 
one  group  to  each  paragraph.  Or  certain  para- 
graphs may  have  only  the  one  group  in  each.  In 
larger  works  there  will  usually  be  several  or  many 
groups  to  each  paragraph.  In  short,  the  group  will 
be  a  smaller  unit  than  the  paragraph. 

When  several  groups  are  used  in  any  one  para- 
graph they  must  obviously  be  much  alike.  This 
follows  from  the  fact  that  they  must  all  present  the 
leading  motive  in  a  consistent  manner,  because  it  is 
the  purpose  of  each  paragraph  to  make  a  perfectly 
clear  and  unified  presentation  of  some  one  phase  of 
the  leading  motive. 

It  will  occur  to  all  that  any  feeling  of  rhythm 
which  our  landscape  compositions  may  possess  is 
likely  to  be  given  through  the  appearance  and  reap.- 
pearance  of  similar  forms  in  successive  groups — is 


103 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

likely  to  be  a  matter  of  grouping.  Now  the  cor- 
respondence between  music  and  landscape  is  very 
close;  and  since  rhythm  plays  so  great  a  role  in 
music  we  might  expect  it  to  be  equally  important  in 
landscape  composition.  But  this  expectation  is  not 
wholly  fulfilled.  Repetition  of  similar  elements — 
lines,  forms,  colors,  species, — is  indeed  a  very  val- 
uable practice  in  landscape  composition,  and  this 
repetition  may  be  fairly  regular  and  rhythmic.  It 
is  easy,  too,  to  cite  the  great  rhythms  of  Nature, 
particularly  the  round  of  the  hours,  of  day  and 
night,  and  of  the  seasons.  Yet  when  we  come  to 
practical  problems  of  grouping  plants  in  informal 
composition  it  must  be  confessed  that  Nature's 
rhythms  are  too  subtle  for  easy  imitation.  The 
landscape  designer,  sitting  at  his  drawing  board, 
with  his  nurseryman's  catalog  in  his  left  hand,  can 
not  make  much  headway  in  his  planting  plans  upon 
any  rhythmic  formula.  Rhythm  in  the  formal  gar- 
den is  a  much  simpler  matter,  for  the  formal  garden 
is  essentially  rhythmic  in  its  structure,  like  poetry. 
It  is  fairly  evident  that  each  group  must  have 
some  character — some  individuality.  Otherwise  it 


104 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

ceases  to  be  a  unit — it  loses  its  unity.  On  the  other 
hand  it  must  not  stand  out  with  such  prominence  as 
to  break  the  unity  of  the  paragraph  of  which  it  is 
a  part,  or  of  the  whole  larger  composition.  Some 
artistic  skill  will  be  required,  therefore,  to  balance 
these  two  tendencies.  No  rules  can  be  made  for 
matters  like  this.  They  are  questions  of  taste  pure 
and  simple,  and  if  a  man  has  not  the  needful  taste, 
he  is  not  a  safe  designer. 

This  much  can  be  said,  however,  that,  in  order 
to  give  any  group  any  individuality  whatever,  or 
any  intelligible  meaning  of  any  sort,  it  will  always 
be  necessary  to  follow  the  law  of  dominance.  Each 
group  must  be  commanded  by  some  one  species,  all 
the  other  members  being  plainly  subordinate. 
Thus  one  plant  each  of  Philadelphus  coronarius, 
Forsythia  suspensa,  Lonicera  tartarica,  Weigelia 
rosea,  Rhodotypos  Kerrioides,  Viburnum  lentago, 
Cornus  florida,  Spirea  callosa,  Cydonia  japonica 
and  Deutzia  gracilis  do  not  constitute  a  group  in 
any  artistic  sense.  Equal  dabs  of  color  out  of  sev- 
eral different  paint  tubes  mixed  on  the  palette  do 
not  make  a  color,  but  only  a  characterless  gray. 


105 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

The  only  possible  way  to  compose  groups  in  land- 
scape gardening  is  to  select  one  species  for  the 
dominating  element  in  each  group,  and  then  to 
build  the  other  material  on  to  this  controlling  quan- 
tity. Naturally  the  dominating  element  will  be  the 
main  factor  in  relating  the  group  to  its  paragraphic 
control  and  to  the  leading  motive  of  the  entire  com- 
position. 

No  survey  of  Nature's  methods  of  grouping 
would  be  complete  without  mention  of  a  landscape 
form  which  classifies  with  difficulty  into  our  poor 
human  categories.  This  is  the  scattered  distribu- 
tion which  presents  individuals,  yet  presents  them 
in  such  constantly  obvious  relationship  that  the 
usual  effect  is  not  that  of  the  individual,  neither  is 
it  the  effect  of  the  mass.  The  most  striking  exam- 
ples of  this  are  to  be  found  in  the  scattered  oaks 
along  the  hills  which  follow  the  Mississippi  river 
from  St.  Paul  to  Cairo,  and  in  the  widely  spaced 
pines  on  the  pine  barrens  of  central  Florida.  There 
are,  however,  hundreds  of  good  examples  of  this 
scattering  habit  in  the  natural  distribution  of  wild 
species. 


106 


WALK    ALOXG    ROCK    CREEK,    WASHINGTON,    D.    C. 


CHESTNUT   TRUNKS.       AX    EFFECTIVE    GROUPING 

Photographs  by  King  and  the  Author 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

Usually  this  arrangement  is  wholly  pleasing  to 
the  eye.  The  spiritual  effect  is  characteristic  and 
agreeable.  It  is  unfortunate,  therefore,  that  this 
method  should  have  been  quite  generally  overlooked 
by  the  men  who  make  planting  plans.  It  would 
seem  to  be  a  method  capable  of  considerable  service 
in  informal  designing. 

Old  time  debates  about  questions  of  grouping 
used  to  turn  usually  upon  the  shapes  of  groups, 
meaning  their  horizontal  projection  or  plan.  Some 
planters,  whatever  their  theoretical  principles, 
plainly  made  all  their  groups  in  a  monotonously 
oval  form.  Hundreds  of  gardeners — and  not  all  of 
them  amateurs — still  speak  of  "clumps  of  bushes" 
or  of  trees.  Quite  recently  I  visited  a  city  park 
where  the  designing  was  professedly  naturalistic 
yet  in  which  the  margin  of  an  informal  lake  was1 
decorated  with  successive,  equally  spaced  perfectly 
circular  "clumps"  of  shrubs,  each  "clump"  of  a 
single  species,  but  each  one  different  from  all  the 
others. 

Earlier  in  this  chapter  reference  has  been  made 
to  the  equilateral  triangle  which  so  easily  becomes  a 


107 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

conventionalized  group  form.  An  examination  of 
any  large  number  of  planting  plans  will  indicate 
how  easy  it  is  to  fall  into  some  set  form  of  grouping 
and  how  very,  very  hard  it  is  to  learn  that  infinite 
variety  which  so  bountifully  blesses  the  works  of 
Nature.  I  have  often  been  especially  impressed 
with  the  structural  stupidity  of  the  ordinary  plan 
for  an  herbaceous  border.  It  consists  of  a  crazy 
patchwork  of  irregular  spots  of  approximately  the 
same  size.  The  finished  border  cannot  be  anything 
except  a  sample  book  of  the  nurseryman's  ma- 
terials. 

Now  the  remedies  for  this  are  three.  Simplifica- 
tion— changing  to  a  much  simpler  geometric  pat- 
tern; dominance — the  selecting  of  one  or  two  spe- 
cies which  shall  be  placed  in  so  large  a  majority  as 
to  control  the  whole;  pictorial  instead  of  horticul- 
tural treatment — making  of  the  border  a  unified 
picture  instead  of  a  collection  of  miscellaneous  gar- 
den plants,  however  pretty  and  pleasing  they  may 
be. 

All  these  faults  of  grouping  have  one  basis  in 
common.  They  all  result  in  part  from  the  perni- 


108 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

cious  habit  of  studying  planting  plans  in  the  flat, 
in  plan  on  the  drawing  board.  Every  designer  at 
his  drawing  tries  of  course  to  visualize  his  group. 
He  tries  to  imagine  how  it  will  look  on  the  ground. 
He  tries  to  picture  it  in  its  vertical  projection.  But 
the  case  is  a  good  deal  like  that  called  to  mind  by 
Josh  Billings  when  he  said,  "All  men  aim  to  tell 
the  truth  but  some  of  them  are  almighty  bad  shots." 
All  men  try  to  imagine  their  groups  in  their  finished 
perspective,  but  unfortunately  many  designers  suf- 
fer from  defective  imagination. 

There  is  some  point  to  the  contention  which  I 
have  heard  from  the  lips  of  infuriated  landscape 
gardeners  that  no  man  should  be  permitted  to  draw 
a  planting  plan  on  paper.  It  might  be  better,  were 
it  practicable,  to  do  all  designing  on  the  ground. 
The  landscapist  could  then  put  his  materials  in 
their  proper  places  in  the  picture,  much  as  a  painter 
puts  a  touch  of  red  here  and  a  stroke  of  orange 
there,  feeling  his  way  slowly  to  the  finished  result. 

Certain  it  is  that  all  grouping  should  be  studied 
with  least  emphasis  upon  plan  and  much  greater 
attention  to  vertical  projection,  and  this  feature  can 


109 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

be  judged  much  better  in  the  field  than  in  the  draft- 
ing room.  The  effective  development  of  sky-lines 
can  hardly  be  reached  in  any  other  way,  yet  effec- 
tive sky-lines  are  indispensable  to  good  landscape 
workmanship.  It  need  hardly  be  remarked  here 
that  the  designing  of  good  sky-lines  is  intimately 
involved  in  the  placing  of  groups  and  in  the  order- 
ing of  paragraphs.  All  these  studies  go  together. 
Whether  the  sky-line  be  long  and  level  or  sharply 
serrated  it  must  harmonize  with  the  principal 
theme.  If  it  has  a  vigorous  rhythm  it  must  cor- 
respond with  the  rhythm  of  the  structural  para- 
graphs and  their  component  groups.  Whatever 
rationale  may  be  discovered  in  the  designing  of  the 
sky-line  must  be  founded  on  the  principle  of  the 
leading  motive,  the  paragraphic  structure  and  the 
development  of  the  group. 

Thus  far  we  have  considered  the  art  of  grouping 
only  with  reference  to  the  external  form  and  inter- 
nal structure  of  groups.  At  least  two  other  mat- 
ters require  attention  in  this  connection,  viz.,  color 
and  texture. 

Much  has  been  said  about  color  harmonies  and 


no 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

color  effects  in  the  garden — much  more,  indeed, 
than  the  matter  warrants.  Color  plays  such  a  very 
important  part  in  some  other  closely  related  arts 
that  beginners  naturally  try  to  follow  the  same 
well-marked  paths  in  garden  designing.  Frankly 
this  color  scheming  in  the  garden  seems  to  me  to 
have  been  greatly  misunderstood.  There  is  a  dan- 
gerous facility  in  the  assumptions  that  gardening 
is  merely  a  decorative  art,  and  that  it  may  therefore 
follow  all  the  rules  of  the  other  decorative  arts. 
Neither  assumption  is  quite  half  true.  The  infer- 
ences and  practices  which  follow  in  this  train  of 
reasoning  are  frequently  altogether  wrong. 

Under  the  first  head  let  it  be  stressed  that  gar- 
dening is  a  structural  art,  like  architecture.  The 
purely  decorative  work  put  upon  a  church  or  villa 
is  its  least  important  feature.  The  architect  is  con- 
cerned mostly  with  foundations,  the  distribution  of 
loads,  the  requirements  of  heat  and  ventilation  and 
all  that  sort  of  thing;  even  the  esthetic  value  of  the 
church  building  is  gained  more  by  structural  mass 
than  by  decorative  detail.  The  art  of  gardening 
stands  precisely  where  architecture  stands  in  this 


in 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

respect,  and  the  one  who  thinks  of  it  merely  as  a 
scheme  of  superficial  ornament  hasn't  come  within 
glimpsing  distance  of  the  main  idea. 

Nevertheless  there  are  many  situations  where  the 
garden,  having  been  built  in  all  structural  sound- 
ness, presents  a  pretty  field  for  purely  decorative 
treatment.  At  this  point  our  second  group  of  mis- 
understandings must  be  forestalled.  These  rest,  as 
has  been  suggested,  upon  the  assumption  that  the 
common  practices  of  decorative  art  may  be  trans- 
ferred without  redigestion  to  use  in  the  garden. 
Take  the  color  scheme  as  an  example.  It  is  one  on 
which  hundreds  of  respectable  men  and  thousands 
of  intelligent  women  have  gone  wrong, — men  and 
women  of  the  right  sort — sound  on  the  suffrage, 
who  go  to  church,  who  know  what  eugenics  is  and 
who  love  their  neighbors  reasonably. 

These  good  people  have  learned  (but  not  in  gar- 
dening) that  the  color  scheme  is  the  greatest  scheme 
in  the  world  for  securing  unity  of  artistic  effect. 
Millicent  spends  the  nights  of  her  girlhood  in  a 
pink  bedroom  developed  by  her  own  good  taste; 
she  adopts  another  color  scheme  for  her  trousseau; 


112 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

she  has  her  new  dining  room  done  in  rich  browns 
and  her  limousine  in  blue.  If  she  gives  a  party,  a 
dance,  or  a  dinner,  the  color  scheme  has  to  be  de- 
cided before  the  menu  or  the  music.  Why  shall  she 
not,  in  the  garden,  where  all  sorts  of  beautiful 
colors  are  placed  at  her  disposal,  mass  them  in  tri- 
umphant color  effects? 

Perhaps  she  should,  but  there  are  important 
points  first  to  be  taken  into  account.  At  the  outset 
she  should  consult  with  nature  who  will  have  much 
to  say  about  the  results  whether  she  be  asked  or  no. 
Now  nature  has  a  color  scheme  of  her  own  for 
every  garden.  Her  ideas  run  very  emphatically 
to  green.  She  is  like  the  famous  fireman  who 
didn't  care  what  color  they  painted  the  hose  wagon 
just  so  it  was  red.  Nature  seems  willing  to  let 
Millicent  adopt  any  sort  of  color  scheme  in  the 
garden  just  so  it  is  green.  And  after  the  dear 
girl  has  spent  years  of  effort  on  her  pink  garden 
she  one  day  begins  to  realize  that  all  the  pink  she 
has  is  a  few  faint  splashes  of  color  on  an  acre  of 
rich  velvety  green  background  and  under  a  bright 
blue  sky.  Nature  has  been  laughing  at  her  all  the 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

while. 

At  sundry  times  and  in  divers  places  it  does  seem 
indeed  as  though  the  good  old  mother  gardener 
would  try  some  novel  color  effects  of  her  own.  She 
does  occasionally  spread  out  those  miles  upon 
miles  of  yellow  California  poppies,  or  cover  a  state 
like  Kansas  with  sunflowers,  or  fill  the  French 
fields  with  poppies  glowing  scarlet,  or  delight  the 
Germans  with  some  acres  of  cyanin-blue  kaiser- 
blumen.  But  mostly  she  comes  back  to  the  greens, 
the  grays  and  the  gray-greens, — and  always  with 
that  inevitable  blue  sky  overhead.  Her  pinks  and 
reds  and  blues  and  purples — colors  which  if  put 
into  Millicent's  dining-room  would  wreck  the  house 
— she  throws  about  quite  carelessly  and  promis- 
cuously. The  most  incompatible  colors  are  set  out 
together  just  as  though  they  had  passed  the  censor- 
ship. At  this  sort  of  thing  nature  beats  the  neo- 
impressionists,  the  cubists,  and  the  militant  suf- 
fragists. 

The  fact  is,  of  course,  that  these  miscellaneous 
colors  are  actually  harmonized  by  Nature,  and  by 
such  heroic  means  as  the  artists  never  could  com- 


114 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

mand.  She  uses  first  that  never-failing  background 
of  cool  green  which  absorbs  so  much  of  the  con- 
flicting colors  that  there  is  little  left  to  offend  the 
eye.  And  then  over  all  there  pours  the  bright  sun- 
shine from  heaven  out  of  that  warm  and  infinite 
sky ;  and  that  brilliant  sunshine,  while  it  makes  the 
individual  colors  more  vivid,  catches  them  up  in 
such  a  quantity  of  white  light  that  they  are  all 
brought  into  solution,  as  it  were,  and  are  effectively 
blended  in  spite  of  all  their  antagonisms.  So  it 
happens  that  color  combinations  which  would  seem 
wild  and  savage  in  the  subdued  light  of  Millicent's 
boudoir  pass  gloriously  unchallenged  out  in  the 
white  sunlight  under  the  open  sky  and  against  that 
quiet  background  of  green. 

Even  at  that,  I  am  often  tempted  to  feel  that  our 
super-civilization  has  made  us  too  finicky  about 
colors.  A  whole  lot  of  the  rules  and  regulations 
which  are  supposed  to  govern  colors  seem  very  arbi- 
trary, and  are  the  invention  of  man  rather  than  a 
wise  interpretation  of  nature.  After  some  years 
of  impeccable  existence  amongst  the  most  delicate 
and  refined  color  modulations  we  suddenly  find  an 


115 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

Indian  blanket  brilliant  with  the  loudest  yellows, 
reds,  and  blues,  but  beautiful  beyond  all  gainsay- 
ing. Or  we  get  a  shelfful  of  old  Bavarian  peasant 
pottery,  or  we  see  the  Swede  girls  in  their  native 
costumes,  and  we  are  lost  in  wonder  that  anything 
so  absolutely  opposed  to  our  teaching  can  be  so 
thoroughly  good.  For  a  moment  we  may  have  a 
suspicion  that  nature  knows  her  own  game  as  well 
as  we  do,  and  is  quite  as  willing  to  have  the  world 
beautiful  in  her  own  way  as  after  any  manner 
which  we  can  teach  her. 

Even  the  artists  themselves  sometimes  attempt 
the  use  of  raw  colors.  One  has  only  to  visit  the 
modern  art  shows  to  see  that  some  of  the  most 
thoughtful  workers  have  decided  that  white  light 
and  the  human  eye  can  be  depended  on  to  resolve 
the  primary  colors  into  harmonious  effects  even 
where  a  scientific  analysis  might  demonstrate  their 
utter  incompatibility. 

All  of  which  is  respectfully  submitted  to  show 
why,  whenever  I  hear  of  some  precious  lady  who 
is  going  to  make  a  pink  garden  or  a  purple  garden, 
I  look  the  other  way  and  smile.  It  would  be  too 


116 


HILLSIDE    GARDEX.       GROUNDS    OF    THE    MASSACHUSETTS    AGRICULTURAL 
COLLEGE 

Designed,  executed  and  photographed  by  the  Author 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

much  to  say  that  questions  of  color  can  be  wholly 
ignored  in  gardening.  The  truth  is  simply  that 
they  have  to  be  treated  quite  differently  from  the 
way  they  are  managed  in  millinery.  Thus,  as  I 
reason  out  the  situation,  I  would  decide  that,  while 
color  patterns  may  possibly  be  worked  out  to  a 
qualified  success  in  the  formal  garden,  there  is  small 
opportunity  for  anything  of  this  sort  in  the  natu- 
ralistic informal  garden. 

Shrubs  and  trees  show  differences  in  color,  to 
be  sure;  and  in  the  art  of  grouping  one  must  see 
that  inharmonious  colors  are  not  placed  side  by  side, 
either  in  the  same  or  in  adjoining  groups.  There 
are  wide  ranges  of  value  in  greens — a  whole  gamut 
between  the  light  gray  greens  and  the  dark  blue 
greens; — and  very  rich,  though  delicate,  modula- 
tions are  possible  within  these  limits.  Here  is  where 
the  landscape  gardener  can  be  as  subtle  as  he 
pleases. 

For  the  most  important  consideration  we  may 
adopt  a  negative  rule,  viz.,  avoid  all  unusual  and 
unnatural  colors.  In  naturalistic  gardening  such 
plants  as  Pissard's  plum,  Schwerdler's  maple  and 


117 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

the  variegated  weigelia  should  be  used  most  rarely 
or  never  at  all. 

To  this  may  be  added  one  simple  rule,  as  follows : 
Use  the  brightest  colors,  when  they  are  used  at  all, 
in  the  distance,  medium  colors  in  middle  ground, 
and  the  softest  colors  in  the  foreground. 

This  method,  it  should  be  clearly  understood,  is 
applicable  only  in  purely  naturalistic  gardening  on 
lands  of  considerable  extent.  In  small  gardens  and 
in  the  areas  about  dwellings,  club  houses,  etc.,  colors 
may  be  handled  quite  differently.  The  scheme  of 
color  planting  recently  presented  by  Professor 
R.  R.  Root,  which  seems  on  its  face  to  contradict 
the  principle  here  laid  down,  is  in  reality  effective 
and  appropriate  in  these  smaller,  more  refined, 
more  humanized  (and  nearly  always  more  formal- 
ized) places. 

Textures  in  naturalistic  planting  are  usually 
more  important  than  colors.  By  texture  in  this 
connection  we  signify  the  size  and  character  of 
foliage  plus  the  habit  of  twig  growth  plus  pretty 
much  the  whole  habit  of  the  plant.  Plants  of  dif- 
ferent habit  of  growth  should  rarely  be  combined 


118 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

in  the  same  group  unless  a  definite  contrast  is  de- 
sired and  achieved.  Textures  of  twig  and  foliage 
should  be  quite  as  carefully  harmonized  as  colors. 

In  general,  too,  we  may  safely  follow  the  rule 
of  placing  the  coarsest  textures  in  the  background 
and  the  most  delicate  textures  in  the  foreground. 

In  special  cases  very  coarse  and  very  fine  textures 
may  be  brought  together  for  purposes  of  contrast, 
remembering  always  that  in  art  harmony  should 
prevail  and  contrast  should  be  the  exception.  Fre- 
quent contrasts  in  any  work  of  art  soon  lose  their 
force  and  become  tedious  or  even  obnoxious. 


119 


FEATURES  AND  FURNISHINGS 

TWO  good  reasons  why  the  formal  garden 
has  sometimes  appealed  more  to  the  popular 
mind  than  has  the  informal  garden  are,  first, 
that  the  former  has  possessed  more  features  of 
striking  interest  and,  second,  that  the  formal  gar- 
den has  often  been  better  supplied  with  the  furni- 
ture necessary  to  make  it  humanly  habitable  and 
usable.     The  informal  garden,  in  a  word,  has  too 
often  been   featureless   and  unfurnished.     These 
faults  ought  to  be  corrected. 

It  is  the  business  of  the  landscape  gardener  to 
supply  these  desirable  features.  He  must  find  them 
on  the  ground,  develop  them,  invent  them,  create 
them — provide  them  by  the  main  strength  of  his 
artistic  genius.  Some  little  study  in  this  field  may 
show  perhaps  that  the  possibilities  are  as  great  for 
the  naturalistic  garden  as  for  the  most  architectural 
enterprise. 

First  of  all  the  landscape  designer  should  utilize 


120 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

to  the  utmost  all  the  natural  scenery.  Every  good 
view,  within  or  without  the  park  or  estate,  should 
be  fully  developed.  This  development  will  require 
at  least  three  things :  First  the  line  of  the  best  view 
must  be  determined  and  kept  open;  second,  this 
view  must  be  framed  by  suitable  plantings;  third, 
inferior  views  must  be  blocked  out  or  reduced  to 
mere  promissory  glimpses. 

As  a  rule  such  special  views  require  further  to 
be  fixed,  marked  and  advertised  by  placing  at  the 
optimum  point  of  observation  an  appropriate  seat, 
carriage  turn,  rest  house  or  some  similar  accessory. 
Thus  the  stranger  is  directed  unmistakably  to  the 
main  feature,  the  desirable  vista  or  the  glorious 
outlook. 

In  formal  garden  design  it  is  considered  abso- 
lutely obligatory  that  each  axis  shall  terminate  upon 
some  adequate  object.  Similarly  in  informal  design 
each  vista  should  terminate  clearly  and  definitively 
upon  some  satisfactory  object.  There  should  be 
some  hill,  mountain,  lake,  church  spire  or  other 
definite  object  of  interest  or  beauty  upon  which 
the  open  vista  clearly  centers.  To  build  up  a  long 


121 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

vista  with  nothing  at  the  end  of  it  is  like  hanging 
on  the  parlor  walls  a  frame  without  any  picture 
in  it. 

In  grounds  of  any  considerable  extent  there  are 
usually  natural  features  which  can  be  played  up 
by  the  intelligent  designer.  A  brook,  no  matter 
how  small  and  mean,  offers  unlimited  possibilities. 
If  there  is  only  a  trickle  of  water  in  it  one  can  set 
back  certain  stretches  so  as  to  make  reaches  of  flat 
water  on  which  the  shadows  lie  and  on  the  margin 
of  which  all  manner  of  aquatic  plants  will  thrive. 
Then  there  will  be  alternating  stretches  of  water 
singing  over  stones  or  flashing  in  the  sun.  Foot 
bridges  or  stepping  stones  at  suitable  points  add 
to  the  picture.  There  may  be  seats  in  shady  nooks 
from  which  one  can  watch  the  panorama  of  life 
upon  the  brook;  while  at  other  points  there  will 
be  sunny,  grassy  glades  opening  back  into  neigh- 
boring meadows  or  looking  out  to  adjoining  lawns. 

In  other  grounds  there  will  be  natural  ponds 
or  cliffs  or  outcrops  of  rock  or  glacier-planed 
boulders  or  old  plantations  of  pine  or  oak.  Every 
such  feature  must  be  seized  upon  and  developed 


122 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

with  skill  and  imagination.  Some  heroic  landscape 
makers  even  create  such  features  for  themselves. 
They  make  artificial  ponds  and  rivulets,  even  arti- 
ficial hills.  One  of  them  of  whom  I  know,  instead 
of  building  a  concrete  retaining  wall  to  stop  the 
erosion  of  a  troublesome  storm-fed  gully,  preferred 
to  reproduce  a  complete  outcrop  of  limestone  ledge, 
stratum  on  stratum.  Such  work,  of  course,  must 
be  very  skillfully  done  or  it  is  anything  but  natu- 
ralistic. But  when  it  is  artistically  successful  it  has 
every  right  to  be  called  good  naturalistic  landscape 
gardening. 

Natural  growth  of  good  trees  or  artificial  forest 
plantations  always  make  good  landscape  features, 
and  should  be  joyfully  accepted  in  works  of  the 
natural  style.  Even  a  single  tree  of  any  size  or 
symmetry  can  be  emphasized  by  proper  vistas  and 
may  be  worth  using  as  a  feature.  The  planting  of 
specimen  trees  and  shrubs  on  all  sorts  of  grounds 
has  unquestionably  been  badly  overdone  in  early 
examples  of  American  landscape  gardening.  This 
particular  trick  may  fairly  be  reckoned  as  a  fault 
of  the  late  Andrew  Jackson  Downing  and  of  his 


123 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

less  capable  disciples.  Specimen  planting  must  be 
done  with  great  restraint;  yet  within  judicious 
limits  it  is  wholly  proper  and  effective. 

It  need  not  be  forgotten,  either,  that  to  many 
sane  and  cultivated  persons  a  garden  is  still  a  place 
where  plants  grow — where  trees  and  shrubs  and 
flowers  are  to  be  enjoyed.  Many  good  people  still 
admire  plants,  and  to  them  no  possible  exhibition 
of  architecture,  statuary  or  ceramics  can  take  the 
place  of  good  maple  trees  or  blossoming  lilacs  or 
masses  of  blue  larkspurs.  The  unlimited  wealth  of 
all  the  nursery  catalogs  is  at  the  command  of  the 
designer  who  is  ready  to  cater  to  this  amiable  and 
legitimate  taste.  There  are  literally  thousands  of 
interesting  plants  which  can  be  employed  to  make 
a  garden  a  place  worth  visiting.  These  embellish- 
ments, too,  have  one  indubitable  advantage  over 
the  sun  dial  and  the  pergola,  in  that  they  change 
from  week  to  week  and  day  to  day.  The  garden 
which  is  ablaze  this  month  with  poppies  may  be 
just  as  glorious  next  month  with  peonies.  The  gar- 
den which  emphasizes  features  of  this  sort  has  a 
wide  versatility. 


124 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

Even  collections  of  plants  are  not  wholly  inad- 
missible. The  "pinetum"  and  the  "orangery"  and 
the  "rosarium"  are  perfectly  good  ideas,  in  spite  of 
their  factitious  origin  and  sometimes  juvenile  treat- 
ment. One  garden  that  I  know  has  specialized  in 
lilies,  and  another  contains  every  species  of  fern 
which  an  enthusiast  and  an  adept  can  grow.  It  is  a 
great  experience  to  see  a  hundred  varieties  of 
peonies  or  dahlias  or  gladioli  all  together.  One 
might  travel  far  for  the  opportunity. 

Such  features  are  worth  putting  into  gardens; 
and  for  the  present  one  need  only  be  reminded  that 
over-planting  and  the  making  of  collections  have 
ruined  more  gardens  than  they  have  made  in 
America.  The  landscape  gardener  who  would  make 
much  of  these  elements  in  his  work  must  be  a  man 
of  power,  that  is,  a  man  of  great  self-restraint.  He 
must  be  a  designer  to  whom  the  initial  plan  is  clear 
and  sacred  or  else  he  will  very  soon  lose  all  sense 
of  design  in  his  enthusiasm  for  his  horticultural 
collections. 

Sometimes  these  collections  of  plant  materials 
may  be  turned  to  a  special  purpose  and  become 


125 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

thereby  new  sources  of  interest  and  pleasure.  For 
instance,  a  bird  garden.  Persons  who  are  fond  of 
flowers  and  of  gardens  (and  not  too  fond  of  cats), 
are  apt  to  be  fond  of  birds  also.  The  cultivation 
of  birds  opens  up  new  and  interesting  possibilities 
in  gardening.  There  will  be  plantings  of  viburnum, 
roses,  mulberries  and  other  materials  on  which  the 
birds  feed;  there  will  be  bird  baths;  there  will  be 
picturesque  little  bird  houses ;  and,  most  interesting 
of  all,  will  be  the  birds  themselves.  If  one  can  have 
in  one's  garden  a  catbird  and  a  thrush,  a  humming 
bird,  two  robins  and  a  song  sparrow,  it  will  prove  a 
great  addition  to  the  columbines  and  sweetpeas. 

A  bird  sanctuary  is  obviously  a  very  appropriate 
feature  for  the  grounds  designed  in  the  natural 
style. 

And  speaking  of  birds  we  should  pause  to  em- 
phasize the  fact  that  any  living  moving  animals 
in  a  garden  or  park  add  enormously  to  the  general 
interest.  The  old  English  parks  often  had  deer 
running  at  large.  I  once  counted  three  hundred 
beneath  the  dining-room  window  of  an  English 
country  house.  A  few  sheep  on  a  park  lawn  will 

126 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

be  photographed  hundreds  of  times  every  week, 
thus  demonstrating  their  pictorial  appeal.  Some, 
Jersey  cows  are  almost  as  good.  Most  park  super- 
intendents try  to  have  a  variety  of  water  fowl — 
ducks,  geese  and  swans — on  their  park  lakes.  All 
this  is  perfectly  good  landscape  gardening. 

Then  there  is  the  garden  theater  or  players' 
green.  Most  of  the  outdoor  theaters  recently  con- 
structed in  America  have  been  of  the  emphatically 
formal  extremely  architectural  type.  They  have 
often  been  called  "Greek"  theaters.  But  neither 
the  Greek  theater  nor  the  garden  theater  need  be 
characteristically  architectural.  The  classic  Greek 
plays  were  probably  presented  originally  amidst 
very  informal  surroundings,  under  the  trees,  on 
bits  of  fortuitous  lawn,  or  even  in  the  street.  The 
architectural  Greek  theater  and  the  big  Roman 
circus  belong  to  a  later  and  possibly  less  artistic 
period. 

Certain  it  is  that  the  modern  outdoor  theatricals 
which  have  been  most  successful  have  been  very 
informally  presented  amidst  characteristically  in- 
formal garden  surroundings.  In  this  list  would 


127 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

come  the  famous  performances  of  the  Ben  Greet 
Players,  the  Coburn  Players,  etc.  In  the  same 
connection  it  is  to  be  remarked  that  the  many  suc- 
cessful pageants  given  in  America  of  late  years 
have  nearly  all  been  staged  in  landscape  settings 
of  the  most  pronounced  informality.  These  facts 
are  pertinent  and  important. 

As  a  problem  in  garden  design,  it  is  wholly 
feasible  to  make  a  garden  theater  or  players'  green 
of  the  most  informal  character.  It  may  be  fitted 
so  snugly  into  the  garden  or  into  the  woods  or 
against  the  stream  bank  that  every  one  would  sup- 
pose it  to  be  wholly  the  work  of  nature  herself. 
There  is  not  space  here  to  discuss  the  whole  com- 
plicated technic  of  outdoor  theater  design;  but  it  is 
a  matter  which  the  proficient  landscape  gardener 
may  be  expected  to  understand  and  to  practice.  So 
here  is  another  feature  of  vital  human  interest  which 
may  add  to  the  charm  of  the  naturalistic  garden. 

Another  special  feature  which  seems  peculiarly 
appropriate  to  the  naturalistic  park  or  garden  is  the 
campfire.  The  campfire  is  a  peculiarly  American 
motive,  associated  with  our  long  years  of  pioneering. 


128 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

From  the  Atlantic  to  the  Pacific  our  civilization  has 
been  carried  forward  by  a  long  relay  of  campfires. 
Thousands  of  men  and  women  now  living  unsus- 
pected in  the  haunts  of  urban  luxury  have  taken 
their  turns  beside  the  evening  blaze  or  cooked  their 
ration  of  bacon  in  the  frying  pan.  That  was  a 
shrewd  observation  made  by  David  Harum  at  New- 
port when  he  offered  to  bet  a  quarter  that,  on  the 
shore  drive,  he  could  make  one-half  the  millionaires 
duck  their  heads  by  shouting  suddenly  "low 
bridge !"  Even  those  who  have  not  personally  lived 
the  camp  life  have  had  father  or  mother  or  uncle 
whose  stories  of  the  early  days  have  fired  the  ten- 
derest  springs  of  imagination. 

Moreover  camping,  even  where  it  has  long  been 
given  up  as  a  mode  of  life,  persists  as  a  glorious 
and  popular  sport.  Thousands  of  men  and  women 
go  camping  annually  for  their  vacations  to  the 
Adirondacks,  to  Canada,  to  the  Rocky  Mountains ; 
and  there,  during  the  happiest  days  of  all  the  year, 
they  sit  and  smoke  and  dream  and  cook  by  the 
birchwood  blaze.  The  great  majority  of  sound, 
healthy  and  really  cultivated  persons  in  this  country 


129 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

know  something  from  personal  experience  of  the 
campfire's  charms.  It  is  not  hard  to  believe  that 
such  persons  would  find  a  garden  campfire  on  their 
own  grounds  an  appealing  reminiscence  of  happy 
experience. 

The  garden  has  long  been  recognized  as  a  happy 
blend  of  those  great  elements  of  earth,  air  (or  sky) , 
plant  life  and  water.  The  practical  necessity  of 
water  in  some  form  in  every  garden  has  been  over- 
looked at  times,  particularly  in  America,  and  par- 
ticularly by  designers  in  the  American  natural 
style.  Just  here  they  lost  a  point  to  the  formal 
designers  who  nearly  always  found  room  for  some 
fountain  or  pool.  Now  in  this  blend  of  elements 
fire  may  have  its  place  as  well  as  earth  and  sky 
and  water,  and  its  human  appeal  is  just  as  primitive 
and  just  as  strong. 

Fire  indeed  is  the  one  of  these  elements  which 
has  oftenest  been  worshipped  by  men.  Even  the 
professors  of  the  purer  and  more  spiritual  religions 
have  frequently  used  fire  in  their  sacrifices  and 
ceremonials ;  and  the  flame  upon  the  altar  or  upon 
the  domestic  hearth  still  appeals  to  us  as  a  definite 

ISO 


A    GARDEN    CAMPFIRE.       THE    AUTHOR  S    GARDEN 

Planned,  executed  and  photographed  by  the  Author 


MOUNTAIN    TRAIL 

Photograph  by  ft 


Author 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

expression  of  divine  mercy. 

There  is  also  the  pictorial  effect  to  be  considered, 
for  a  garden  is  made  partly  to  be  looked  at.  Now 
a  campfire  against  a  dark  background  of  trees,  in 
the  dusk  of  the  evening,  with  its  inviting  flicker  of 
flame  and  its  up-curling  thread  of  smoke,  makes 
about  as  fetching  a  picture  as  the  garden  artist 
can  ever  hope  to  compose.  The  quiet  evening  after- 
supper  hour  is  often  the  very  best  one  of  the  day 
in  the  garden.  It  is  the  hour  when  the  family  can 
be  together  and  when  intimate  friends  can  drop  in 
for  a  word  of  gossip. 

The  technical  methods  to  be  observed  by  the 
landscape  architect  in  installing  the  garden  camp- 
fires  need  not  be  wholly  overlooked.  It  is  to  be 
observed  first  that,  as  this  motive  comes  from  the 
pioneer  life  or  from  the  vacation  experiences  in  the 
wild  woods,  it  harmonizes  best  with  the  wilder 
aspects  of  landscape  gardening.  The  campfire 
should  be  relatively  remote  from  the  house,  in  the 
most  informal  part  of  the  grounds,  and  should  have, 
if  at  all  possible,  its  background  of  tall,  dark  trees. 

It  is  good  art,  furthermore,  to  associate  the  camp- 


131 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

fire  with  water,  either  the  level  pond  or  the  running 
brook.  The  typical  camp -site  must  be  beside  a 
stream  or  lake;  and  thus  the  associations  aroused 
by  the  one  are  intensified  by  the  other.  And,  more- 
over, the  pictorial  effect  of  the  flame  reflected  in  the 
still  water  is  well  worth  planning  for. 

It  should  be  understood  that  a  garden  campfire 
is  not  a  bonfire.  Indeed  a  blaze  the  size  of  a  teacup 
is  frequently  all  that  is  desired.  All  the  furniture 
necessary  in  providing  for  this  is  a  bare  bit  of  earth 
six  feet  in  diameter,  though  a  few  rough  stones 
laid  into  a  loose  pavement,  with  two  central  stones 
on  which  to  place  the  fuel,  make  a  convenient 
arrangement.  A  simple  flagging  of  cement  may 
be  laid,  but  this  verges  rapidly  away  from  the  rustic 
informality  appropriate  to  the  scene. 

Some  comfortable  seats  ought  to  be  provided  in 
connection  with  every  campfire.  These  should  be 
as  simple  and  plain  as  possible,  harmonizing  with 
their  surroundings. 

Statuary  in  bronze,  marble  or  plaster,  has  been 
used  many  times  in  naturalistic  gardens  in  Europe 
and  America.  It  must  be  allowed  that  in  a  few 


132 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

cases  these  experiments  have  been  successful.  They 
have  proved  that  it  is  possible  to  find  plastic  figures 
or  groups  which  will  fit  artistically  into  a  natural- 
istic or  semi-naturalistic  environment.  More  than 
that  could  hardly  be  claimed;  and  it  would  have 
to  be  understood  that  sculpture  of  all  sorts  nearly 
always  comports  better  with  the  formal  garden. 

Aside  from  these  special  features  of  interest  every 
garden,  even  the  wildest,  needs  some  of  the  furni- 
ture of  civilization.  The  human  man  still  demands 
his  creature  comforts. 

Whoever  has  gone  house  hunting,  and,  piloted 
about  by  the  dapper  agent,  has  wandered  from 
one  empty  tenement  to  another,  has  acquired  in  an 
intense  form  the  feeling  which  goes  also  with  the 
unfurnished  garden.  The  rooms  are  bare,  blank, 
chill  and  cheerless.  That  place  which,  with  a  few 
chairs  and  tables,  a  picture  and  a  ribbon,  was  a 
bright  and  habitable  home,  is  now  more  dreary  than 
a  cemetery;  and  the  dapper  house  agent  reminds 
one  painfully  of  the  cheerful  businesslike  under- 
taker. The  difference  between  a  living  home  and 
a  dead  empty  house  of  course  lies  in  the  human 


133 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

persons  who  daily  inhabit  the  former.  Yes,  to  be 
sure;  but  it  seems  to  be  in  the  furniture.  The 
illusion  is  so  powerful  that  no  one  can  escape  it. 
Even  a  dog  feels  it;  and  the  dullest  mind  is  sure 
to  find  that  the  house  deserted  by  human  beings  is 
haunted  by  horrible  ghosts.  So  strongly  does  the 
mind  respond  to  this  condition  of  desolation. 

All  this  argument  carries  over  directly  to  the 
garden.  For,  though  many  people  do  not  feel  it 
nor  make  it  true,  the  garden  is  just  as  much  a  part 
of  the  home  as  the  library  or  billiard  room.  And 
the  very  reason  why  some  folks  do  not  find  it  so  is 
that  the  garden,  like  the  tenantless  house,  lies  open, 
bleak  and  unfurnished,  to  the  cold  wind  or  the 
burning  sun.  This  condition  is  commoner  in 
American  gardens  than  in  those  of  Europe.  In  our 
land  the  garden  seems  to  be  considered  solely  a 
field  of  horticultural  experiments, — a  place  to  grow 
trees  or  shrubs  or  pretty  flowers, — a  spot  to  be 
looked  at  occasionally  and  admired  rather  than  a 
place  to  be  lived  in  constantly  and  enjoyed. 

To  tell  the  whole  truth,  of  course,  it  would  be 
necessary  to  say  that  there  are  a  few  gardens  in 


134 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

America  which  are  over-furnished.  For  it  is  just 
as  possible  to  overdo  this  work  of  gardening  as  to 
underdo  it;  and  since  the  former  is  much  the  com- 
moner fault  in  American  house  furnishing  we  might 
possibly  expect  to  see  the  same  defect  creeping 
into  gardens.  The  overloaded  gardens  in  this  coun- 
try are  mostly,  on  the  contrary,  the  distinctively 
un-American  gardens.  Usually  they  are  filled  with 
European  or  Asiatic  junk  and  are  called  Italian 
gardens  or  Japanese  gardens.  But  these  cases  are 
exceptional,  and  may  be  passed  over  with  this  brief 
reference. 

The  opposite  mistake  of  leaving  the  garden  bare 
of  furniture  is  the  common  one  with  us.  It  is  well 
nigh  the  rule,  especially  in  our  gardens  made  after 
the  natural  style.  There  are  thousands  of  gardens, 
otherwise  pretty  well  made,  which  haven't  in  them 
a  single  bench  or  chair  or  table  or  shelter,  nor 
even  a  wheelbarrow  to  sit  down  upon  should  one 
desire  to  smoke  or  talk  or  watch  a  humming  bird 
at  the  columbines.  These  gardens  are  as  absolutely 
devoid  of  those  conveniences  which  would  make 
them  habitable  as  the  house  which  has  only  the 


135 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

paper  on  the  walls.  The  notable  lack  of  use  suf- 
fered by  our  American  gardens  goes  on  all  fours 
with  this  lack  of  usable  furniture.  In  fact  nothing 
would  go  so  far  toward  popularizing  our  gardens, 
bringing  them  into  steady  use  and  making  them  a 
vital  organic  part  of  the  home,  as  to  fit  them  with 
suitable  furniture. 

First  of  all  there  should  be  shelter.  Instead  of 
the  pergola  and  the  classical  "temple"  or  "gazebo" 
or  "music  house,"  there  may  be  the  "arbor,"  the 
"summer  house,"  the  "log  cabin,"  the  boat  house  or 
the  fishing  lodge.  There  are  just  as  many  ideas — 
just  as  many  motives, — amongst  which  we  may 
choose  in  naturalistic  gardening  as  in  formal  work, 
only  we  haven't  so  fully  developed  them. 

Such  shelters,  protecting  against  rain  or  sun  or 
wind,  enable  tender  persons  to  remain  in  the  garden 
many  hours  when  without  them  they  would  be 
driven  in  to  the  library  or  the  bridge  table.  The 
typical  American  garden  porch  is  a  move  in  the 
right  direction,  but  it  ought  not  to  be  the  last  move. 

Wherever  there  are  shelters  there  will  nearly 
always  be  places  to  sit,  but  there  ought  to  be  ample 


136 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

temptation  to  linger  and  rest  at  other  points  in  the 
park.  Especially  at  those  stations  where  good 
views  are  to  be  enjoyed,  should  there  be  ample  pro- 
vision of  seats.  In  the  family  garden  there  ought 
to  be  hospitable  allowance  of  both  seats  and  tables, 
such  that  meals  may  be  taken,  reading  made  easy, 
card  games  enjoyed,  and  so  that  those  who  want 
merely  to  sit  and  visit  may  find  full  opportunity. 

Amidst  naturalistic  surroundings  the  landscape 
gardener,  of  course,  will  not  install  the  marble 
tables  and  seats  of  the  big  formal  garden,  but  he 
will  be  able  to  provide  substantial  wooden  benches 
and  furniture  of  more  or  less  rustic  design.  The 
extreme  rustic  fad  of  the  'fifties — twisted  and  con- 
torted tree  stems  grotesquely  woven  into  settees 
or  chairs — should  be  forgotten ;  but  the  plain  rough- 
sawed  or  hewn  planks  of  more  modern  times, 
stained  or  weathered,  are  both  appropriate  in  the 
picture  and  comfortable  in  the  using. 

Such  seats  and  tables,  it  has  been  suggested,  will 
be  placed  where  there  are  good  views.  A  more 
exact,  and  at  the  same  time  a  more  comprehensive, 
rule  would  be  to  place  them  at  the  nodes  in  the 


137 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

design.  Thus  these  help  materially  to  emphasize 
the  artistic  paragraphs  in  which  the  design  develops. 

Certain  outdoor  games  may  be  provided  for  in 
the  garden  or  the  park,  and  such  provisions  help 
further  to  add  interest  to  the  place  and  to  popular- 
ize the  landscape  gardening  in  a  good  and  proper 
sense.  Of  these  golf  is  the  one  game  which  prac- 
tically demands  a  background  highly  developed  in 
the  natural  style.  Golf  in  a  formal  garden  would 
be  less  fitting  than  a  dress  suit  on  a  fishing  trip. 
But  tennis,  baseball,  croquet,  bowling,  and  other 
games  can  be  nicely  managed  in  naturalistic 
grounds  of  suitable  size. 

In  all  northern  climates  special  provision  may 
very  well  be  made  for  skating.  This  and  other  ice 
sports  belong  in  the  informal  landscape  almost  as 
distinctively  as  does  the  game  of  golf.  And,  simi- 
larly, in  larger  grounds  where  water  is  present, 
arrangements  can  sometimes  be  secured  for  the 
corresponding  summer  sports, — such  as  bathing, 
boating  and  fishing. 

Yes,  there  are  hundreds  of  things  which  the  good 
designer  can  do  to  put  life,  interest  and  variety 


138 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

into  his  naturalistic  compositions.  The  well- 
trained  landscape  gardener  will  have  studied  these 
items  of  his  art  and  will  know  how  to  develop  them 
with  taste  and  discretion. 


139 


THE  OPEN  FIELD 

ONE  does  not  need  to  be  a  partisan  advocate 
of  the  natural  style  of  landscape  garden- 
ing to  believe  that  it  has  a  wide  present 
usefulness  and  a  glorious  future.     Let  us,  there- 
fore, avoiding  all  invidious  comparison,  try  to  esti- 
mate the  special  field  of  the  naturalistic  style. 

First  of  all  let  us  remember  that  to  the  profes- 
sional landscape  gardeners,  in  a  rather  special  sense, 
is  given  the  custody  of  the  native  landscape.  This 
immeasurably  precious  heritage  ought  to  be  pre- 
served and  passed  on  to  succeeding  generations  in 
all  its  pristine  loveliness.  It  may  be  modified  here 
and  there,  forests  may  be  cut,  prairies  plowed  and 
cities  built;  but  the  beauty  and  majesty  of  the  land- 
scape in  its  entirety  need  not  be  impaired.  And 
adequate  types  of  all  pure  landscapes  will  every- 
where be  preserved. 

Elsewhere  we  have  said  that  the  work  of  the 
landscape  amateur  and  of  the  professional  practi- 


140 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

tioner  is  (1)  to  conserve  the  native  landscape,  (2) 
to  restore  the  landscape  where  it  has  been  need- 
lessly despoiled,  (3)  to  improve  and  clarify  the 
existing  examples  of  native  landscape,  ( 4 )  to  make 
the  landscape  physically  accessible  to  all  men, 
women  and  children,  (5)  to  make  it  intellectually 
intelligible,  and  (6)  to  give  spiritual  interpretation 
to  the  landscape.  This  is  a  great  and  glorious 
charge.  As  we  have  said,  it  falls  primarily  upon 
the  professional  landscape  gardeners;  for  if  they 
do  not  understand  and  love  the  landscape,  who 
shall?  And  if  they  do  not  labor  to  conserve  and 
restore  it,  who  will  lift  a  hand?  If  they  cannot 
improve  and  clarify  it,  who  can?  If  they  cannot 
make  it  physically  and  intellectually  accessible,  who 
will  show  the  way?  And  if  they  cannot  give  it  a 
spiritual  interpretation  then  the  whole  effort  fails 
at  last. 

Now  all  these  great  duties  devolve  on  all  land- 
scape gardeners,  but  most  especially  on  those  who 
know  and  love  the  naturalistic  form  of  landscape 
design.  These  duties  will  fall  on  these  men  some- 
times as  matters  of  public  responsibility.  There 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

will  be  many  cases  in  which,  as  citizens,  they  must 
defend  the  landscape  without  hope  of  remuneration. 
There  will  be  many  cases,  however,  in  which  they 
will  find  congenial  and  profitable  employment  in 
these  tasks. 

For  one  thing  there  will  always  be  suburban  and 
country  estates  and  country  clubs  where  private 
owners  will  require  designs  conceived  and  carried 
out  in  the  natural  style.  In  many  cases  these  pri- 
vate commissions  will  involve  the  preservation  of 
natural  forests,  lakes,  islands  and  streams  and  their 
development  to  the  best  of  their  native  character. 
This  is  the  field  in  which  all  landscape  gardening 
began,  the  natural  style  with  the  rest, — and  it  is  a 
field  which  will  never  be  exhausted  as  long  as  men 
make  new  homes. 

In  the  second  place  it  is  an  error  to  suppose  that 
the  natural  style,  even  in  its  extreme  forms,  is  out- 
lawed in  park  design.  Of  course,  it  is  no  longer 
accepted  without  question  as  the  only  style  for  park 
design.  We  are  now  making  our  city  parks  into 
genuine  recreation  grounds.  Recreation  facilities 
have  come  to  be  altogether  more  important  than 


142 


WHERE    WOODS    AND    MEADOW    MEET 

Photograph  by  the  Author 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

landscape  pictures,  no  matter  how  pretty  the  pic- 
tures may  be.  At  the  same  time,  however,  all  enter- 
prising cities  are  reaching  out  to  equip  themselves 
with  rural  parks — with  large  sections  of  wild  land 
at  relatively  long  distances  from  the  crowded  city 
section, — and  these  outer  parks  are  to  be  real 
scenery  reservations.  They  will  still  be  devoted  to 
recreation,  but  to  the  larger,  quieter  forms,  such 
as  camping,  boating,  and  fishing.  In  these  parks 
the  work  of  the  landscape  designer  must  lie  in  the 
direction  of  the  most  advanced  natural  style. 

Beyond  these  outer  city  parks  will  lie  the  country 
parks.  There  will  be  county  and  state  reserves. 
Such  reserves  are  now  just  being  made  by  the  more 
enterprising  counties  and  commonwealths.  State 
park  systems  will  very  soon  emerge;  and  as  there 
is  a  logical  place  for  them  in  civilization,  we  may 
expect  for  them  a  large  future.  These  state  parks 
will  be  concerned  chiefly  with  the  conservation  of 
large  tracts  of  wild  land,  that  is  of  native  land- 
scape ;  and  the  problem  will  be  not  only  to  conserve, 
but  to  improve  these  tracts  and  to  make  them 
physically  and  spiritually  accessible.  The  only  pos- 


143 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

sible  treatment  of  such  problems  in  the  hands  of 
the  landscape  gardener  lies  in  the  application  of 
the  natural  style  of  design  and  development. 

Beyond  the  state  parks  lie  the  national  parks. 
These  already  are  a  public  asset  of  incalculable 
value.  We  have  already  taken  over  several  millions 
of  acres  in  national  parks,  including  superlative 
types  of  some  of  our  best  American  scenery, — and 
in  that  category  I  include,  as  a  matter  of  course, 
the  Canadian  scenery  and  the  Canadian  national 
parks.  A  good  many  more  of  these  national  parks 
remain  to  be  established.  This  movement  is  des- 
tined to  go  forward  with  vigor  for  another  fifty 
years.  In  the  meantime  we  shall  discover  that  other 
great  areas,  held  primarily  as  national  forests,  can 
serve  most  admirably  all  the  purposes  of  parks 
without  in  the  least  impairing  their  usefulness  as 
forests.  Their  park  qualities  will  be  developed 
accordingly. 

We  have,  therefore,  in  hand  several  millions  of 
acres  of  national  park  lands  (including  the  national 
forests  and  the  national  monuments),  with  other 
millions  fairly  in  sight,  and  we  are  just  organizing 


144 


The  Natural  Style  in  Landscape  Gardening 

a  national  park  service  to  develop  these  unimagined 
resources  in  the  public  interest.  This  is  an  enter- 
prise worth  more  to  the  country  than  all  the  armies 
ever  organized  and  all  the  navies  ever  built.  And 
this  magnificent  enterprise  will  soon  be  in  the  hands 
of  the  landscape  gardeners;  for  who  can  deal  with 
it  except  the  men  best  trained  in  the  love  of  the 
landscape  and  in  the  technical  methods  by  which 
alone  it  can  be  conserved,  restored,  improved,  clari- 
fied, made  available  and  spiritually  effective  in  the 
hearts  of  men  and  women? 

Yes,  indeed,  the  natural  style  of  landscape  gar- 
dening has  before  it  the  greatest  opportunities  ever 
offered  to  any  art  at  any  time  in  the  world's  history. 
It  is  high  time  that  this  old,  yet  ever  new,  natural 
style  received  a  more  thoroughgoing  study  at  the 
hands  of  all  thoughtful  persons,  but  especially  by 
those  who  call  themselves  professional  landscape 
architects. 


145 


INDEX 


INDEX 


Agricultural  Landscape,  39 
Animals,  126 
Applications,  140 
Art  of  Grouping,  92 
Artificial  Landscape,  123 

Birch  Tree  Motive,  67 
Bird  Garden,  126 
Brook,  Treatment  of,  122 
Brooks,  37 
Brown,  Launcelot,  14 

Campfire,  128 
Campfire  Construction,  131 
Catholicity  of  Taste,  12 
Climatic  Influences,  47 
Color  Composition,  111 
Colors  in  Nature,  114 
Connecticut  Motive,  70 
Country  Clubs,  142 
Country  Estates,   142 
Country  Parks,  143 
County  Parks,  143 

Division  of  Land,  75 

Ecological  Grouping,  51 
English  Style,  19 
Entrance  Design,  74 

Farmer   and  the   Landscape, 
30 


Features,  120 

Fire,  130 

Florida  Pine  Tree  Motive,  67 

Forester  and  the  Landscape, 

31 

Forests,  36 
Form,  20 

Form  and  Spirit,  43 
Furnishings,  120 
Furniture,  133 

Garden  Forms,  20 

Garden  Theater,  127 

Gardening,  33 

Geologic  Forces,  46 

Golf,  138 

Group  Forms,  107 

Grouping,  92 

Groups   of   Different   Types, 

93 
Growth,  74 

Hills,  37 

History  Motive,  71 
Hollyhock  Motive,  68 

Indian  Idea  of  Nature,  54 
Indigenous  Species,  17 
Individuality  of  Groups,  104 
Informal  Tree  Row,  100 
"Illinois  Way/'  17 
Italian  Style,  19 


149 


Index 


Japanese  Style,  15 

Lakes,  38 

Landscape  Conservation,  140 
Landscape  Forms,  44 
Landscape  Motive,  6S 
Landscape    Motive    Defined, 

66 

Langley,  Batty,  13 
Laws  of  Grouping,  98 
Leit-Motiv,  64 
Literature  of  the  Landscape, 

55 

Mass  Planting,  49-101 

Miller,  Wilhelm,  Quoted,  17 

Mixed  Groups,  97 

Motives,  63 

Motives  Classified,  72 

Mountains,  35 

Muddy  Brook  Parkway,  69 

Music  and  the  Landscape,  56 

National  Forests,  144 
National  Parks,   144 
Native  Flora,  16 
Native  Landscape,  25 
Native  Species,  49 
Natural     Composition     Sum- 
marized,  90 
Natural  Forests,  123 
Natural  Style  Defined,  24 

Oak-Tree  Motive,  66 
Outdoor  Games,  138 
Outdoor  Sports,  32 


Over-Furnishing,  134 
Over-Planting,  125 

Painters  of  Landscape,  56 

Paragraphic  Development,  81 

Paragraphic   Structure,  66 

Park  Composition,  77 

Park  Design,  142 

Pictorial  Grouping,  108 

Pioneer   and   the   Landscape, 
31 

Pitch-Pine  Society,  52 

Plains,  35 

Plant  Collections,  124 

Plant  Materials,  48 

Plant  Societies,  51 

Planting,  48 

Planting  Plans,  109 

Players'  Green,  127 

Power  of  Landscape,  26 

Prairie  Motive,  69 

"Prairie  Spirit  in  Landscape 
Gardening,"  47 

Preservation    of    the    Land- 
scape,  140 

Principles  of  Structural  Com- 
position, 74 

Professional  Landscape  Archi- 
tect, 140 

Prose  Composition,  65 

Rhythm,  103 
River  Motive,  68 
Rivers,  87 
Rows  of  Trees,  99 
Rural  Parks,  143 


150 


Index 


Scattered  Plantings,  106 

Sea,  34 

Seats,  136 

Shakespeare  Motive,  71 

Shapes  of  Groups,  107 

Shelter,  136 

Simplification  of  Groups,  108 

Sky,  29 

Sky  Lines,  110 

Social  Group,   102 

Soil  and  Moisture,  50 

Specimen  Plants,  93 

Spirit  of  Beauty,  59 

Spirit  of  Joy,  60 

Spirit  of  Life,  58 

Spirit  of  Mystery,  60 

Spirit  of  Natural  Landscape, 

21 

Spirit  of  Peace,  59 
Spirit  of  Power,  59 
Spirit   of    Reverence,   61 
Spirit  of  the  Landscape,  53 
Squaw  Birch  Society,  51 
State  Reservations,  143 
Structural  Composition,  74 
Study  of  Landscape,  28-41 


Style,  18 

Subdivision  into  Parts,  75 
Suburban  Estates,  142 
Summer  Sports,  138 
Sunflower  Motive,  68 

Tables,  137 

Termination  of  Vistas,   121 

Textures,  118 

Theme,  63 

Topography,  45 

Triangular  Grouping,   107 

Types  of  Landscape,  34 

Unity  of  Theme,  66 
Universality  of  Landscape,  27 

Vacation    in   the   Landscape, 

32 

Vegetation,  47 
Vistas,  121 

Water,  30 

Water  in  the  Garden,  130 
What  is  Meant,  11 
Winter    Sports,    138 


151 


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